81
" You’ve got to listen! She would come back to me after a night all over the city and lie down beside me and she would say, ‘I want to make everyone happy,’ and her mouth was drawn down. ‘I want everyone to be gay, gay. Only you,’ she said, holding me, ‘only you, you mustn’t be gay or happy, not like that, it’s not for you, only for everyone else in the world.’ She knew she was driving me insane with misery and fright; only,” she went on, “she couldn’t do anything because she was a long way off and waiting to begin. It’s for that reason she hates everyone near her. It’s why she falls into everything, like someone in a dream. It’s why she wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. A shadow was falling on her—mine—and it was driving her out of her wits. "
― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood
91
" «Noi ci volgiamo all'Oriente in cerca di una saggezza che non useremo, e al dormiente in cerca del segreto che non scopriremo. E allora vi chiedo: com'è la notte, la notte terribile? L'oscurità è il rifugio dove va ad appollaiarsi il cuore dell'amata, ed è l'uccello notturno che gracchia contro il suo spirito e il vostro, lasciando cadere in mezzo a voi l'orrenda estraneità delle sue viscere. Il gocciolio delle vostre lacrime è il suo pulsare implacabile. Gli abitanti della notte non seppelliscono i loro morti, la creatura mondata del guscio dei suoi gesti essi l'appendono al collo a voi, sveglia, che siete la loro beneamata. E dovunque andiate, la creatura vi seguirà, voi coi vostri vivi, l'amata coi suoi morti, e non morirà mai, verso la luce del giorno, verso la vita, verso il dolore, fino a che non sarete entrambe carogne.» "
― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood
93
" Ah, mighty uncertainty!" said the doctor. "Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse-meat that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears. Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart. "
― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood
100
" I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you'll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other that they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on, eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin. "
― Djuna Barnes , Nightwood