Djuna Barnes quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Djuna Barnes on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.

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

Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness;

No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible
it is a form of immortality

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

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

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

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

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

Destiny and history are untidy.

Looking down the barrel of your eye, I see the body of a Bloody Cinderella looking back.

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

The doctor lifted the bottle. "Thank you," said Felix. "I never drink spirits."
"You will," said the doctor.

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

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

His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown.

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

No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into ...

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

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

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

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

Man makes his history with the one hand and "holds it up" with the other.

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

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

I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say "Love" and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.

To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.

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

Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?

Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.

Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it!

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

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

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?

A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.

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

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

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

Only the impossible lasts forever.

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

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

Now I see that night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

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

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

... everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget - the design of life; and good when we are forgotten - the design of death.

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

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

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

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

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

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.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

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.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.

Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?

Life, the permission to know death.

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.

A Jew's undoing is never his own, it is God's; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian's.

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

Oh," he cried. "A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart!

Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all ...

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

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

Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.

To think is to be sick...

There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own decent