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Djuna Barnes QUOTES

Djuna Barnes QUOTES

1 " She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom. "

― Djuna Barnes

2 " there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

3 " the ballerina on perfected toe
Spins to the axis of a fortitude
That is the sum of all her yesterdays. "

― Djuna Barnes

4 " The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

5 " ...he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called 'strange.' A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

6 " None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

7 " To think is to be sick... "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

8 " I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished. "

― Djuna Barnes

9 " She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it—infants, angels, priests, the dead; why—should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?' She thought: 'He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

10 " He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

11 " I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

12 " To love without criticism is to be betrayed. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

13 " I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

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

― Djuna Barnes

15 " The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections. Fancy gallops to take part in that duel, unconstrained by any certain articulation of the laws of that unseen game. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

16 " Love of two things often makes one thing right. Think of the fish racing the sea, their love of air and water turning them like wheels, their tails and teeth biting the water, their spines curved round the air. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

17 " And me who seem curious because no one has seen me for a million years, and now I'm seen! Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty? Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

18 " This would be a fine world, Lord, if you could get everybody out of it. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood

19 " Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woolen table-spread, a color at once strange and attractive, an obstinate color, a color that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead... "

― Djuna Barnes

20 " There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary that has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching. "

― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood