Djuna Barnes Quotes - Page 3

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

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

One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth.

Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.

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

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

“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

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

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.

Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?' For a moment he did not answer. Taking up the decanter he held it to the light. 'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.' She came toward him. 'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.

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

If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for - or ignored.

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

When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty elms, not shadows of a fading summer; but swinging shapes as of books upon a strap, of round and square boxes held under an arm, of hurrying little people heading towards the nearest school.

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.

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

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