Djuna Barnes Quotes - Page 2

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.

There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?

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

Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.

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.

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

Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

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

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

Life, the permission to know death.

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

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.

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

To think is to be sick.

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

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

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

My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.

The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.

When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder; one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston; one goes to the Bowery.

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

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

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.

We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.