Djuna Barnes Quotes

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.

Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.

I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?

Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.

Destiny and history are untidy.

Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.

No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.

Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.

The Seal, she lounges like a bride,Much too docile, there's no doubt;Madame Récamier, on side,(if such she has), and bottom out.

Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy

Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.

The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.

Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.

God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

Una's face was an unbroken block of calculation, saving where, upon her upper lip, a little down of hair fluttered. Yet it gave one an uncanny feeling. It made one think of a tassel on a hammer.

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.

I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.

I've seen death and I didn't like it.

A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.

One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.

Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?

And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

I couldn't ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap; it wouldn't even fill up the hole that the mice came through.

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.

New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.

I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.