Djuna Barnes Quotes

In Nora's heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora's blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be unloved, corrupt or put away. Robin was now beyond timely changes, except in the blood that animated her. ~ Djuna Barnes

There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she 'just loved Thelma.' Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it's politically maddening, but I've also always thought it a little romantic - the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one. ~ Maggie Nelson

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

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

Life, the permission to know death. ~ Djuna Barnes

With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unraveling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor's pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a peal: so he would have to cover the doctor. 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, though originally brought on by no will of his own. ~ Djuna Barnes

The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. 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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

His fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan; some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer."
--from "La Somnambule" (1937) by Djuna Barnes ~ Shaun Whiteside

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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 ... ~ Djuna Barnes

What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence - and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he get's the bum's rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you'll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her "escape" again. That's why she can't "put herself in another's place," she herself is the only "position"; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can't do anything in relation to anyone but herself. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

Listen! Do things look in the ten and twelve of noon look as they do in the dark? Is the hand, the face, the foot, the same face and hand and foot seen by the sun? For now the hand lies in a shadow; its beauties and its deformities are in a smoke - there is a sickle of doubt across the cheek bone thrown by the hat's brim, so there is half a face to be peered back into speculation. A leaf of darkness has fallen under the chin and lies deep upon the arches of the eyes; the eyes themselves have changed their colour. The very mother's head you swore by in the dock is a heavier head, crowned with ponderable hair. ~ Djuna Barnes

Origami Striptease reads like William S. Burroughs and Djuna Barnes howling at a brutal paper moon. ~ Susan Stinson

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. ~ Djuna Barnes

There goes the dismantled - Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman," he thought to himself, "without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman," he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, "and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere," he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. "Out looking for what she's afraid to find - Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

The people ... they are church-broken, nation-broken
they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule. ~ Djuna Barnes

I've seen death and I didn't like it. ~ Djuna Barnes

Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself? ~ Djuna Barnes

To think is to be sick... ~ Djuna Barnes

Our bones only ache while the flesh is on them. Stretch it 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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

It does seem, in other words, not only more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a woman writer (which corresponds to the male situation of experimental writer vs. writer), but also peculiarly more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a male experimental writer. She may, if young, get caught up in a "movement," like Djuna Barnes, like H.D., like Laura Riding, as someone's mistress, and then be forgotten, or if old, she maybe "admitted" into a group, under a label, but never quite as seriously considered as the men in that group. ~ Christine Brooke-Rose

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

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

And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it's really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I'm contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein's line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon's too, there's another anecdote. And it's burned in my brain his ~ Kate Zambreno

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? ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

We look to the East for a wisdom that we shall not use - and to the sleeper for the secret that we shall not find. So, I say, what of the night, the terrible night? The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart, and that night-fowl that caws against her spirit and yours, dropping between you and her the awful estrangement of his bowels. The drip of your tears in his implacable pulse. Night people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures. And where you go, it goes, the two of you, your living and her dead, that will not die; to daylight, to life, to grief, until both are carrion. ~ Djuna Barnes

Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten. ~ Djuna Barnes

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

And once Father Lucas said to me, 'Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough
you've got to know how.' So I got to thinking and I said to myself, 'This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me
be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

You know what man really desires?" inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. "One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact. ~ Djuna Barnes

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? ~ Djuna Barnes

We wake from our doings in a deep sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names with which to deny them. Their very lack of identity makes them ourselves. For by a street number, by a house, by a name, we cease to accuse ourselves. Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations. ~ Djuna Barnes

A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth! ~ Djuna Barnes

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

She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time
because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace. ~ Djuna Barnes

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. ~ Djuna Barnes

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

For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave. ~ Djuna Barnes

Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness; ~ Djuna Barnes

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

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

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

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

If you are old and you wish to be young again, if only for a moment, try and identify a dragonfly. ~ Simon Barnes

Darryl likes codes," Skylar explained. "A few weeks ago, I asked him what someone might hypothetically need to break into a supercomputer. He hypothetically made me this. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Walking in heels while wearing a ball gown was, as it turned out, more difficult than finagling an invitation to a state dinner. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Katniss isn't the kind of hero we're used to seeing in fiction. She reacts more than she acts, she doesn't want to be a leader, and by the end of Mockingjay, she hasn't come into her own or risen like a phoenix from the ashes for some triumphant moment that gives us a sense of satisfaction with how far our protagonist has come.
She's not a Buffy. She's not a Bella. She limps across the finish line when we're used to seeing heroes racing; she eases into a quiet, steady love instead of falling fast and hard. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

She wasn't going to sit and wait. She was done waiting, because you could spend your whole life waiting for something to happen. Something big. You could wait and wait, and even if something big happened, even if it finally happened - it didn't change anything. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Enjoy that special place. ~ Emilie Barnes

Sexuality is a topic that has huge shifts in -society. Attitudes toward different sexualities change, but the actual sexuality of a human being is something that's consistent, and it's consistently interesting, and so people write about it. ~ Ben Barnes

Still, even after the black winger John Barnes scored his solo goal to beat Brazil in Rio in 1984, the Football Association's chairman was harangued by England fans on the flight back home: "You fucking wanker, you prefer sambos to us. ~ Simon Kuper

My little sister snuck out of the house carrying a circular-saw blade and a can of Mace. I couldn't exactly let her come alone. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I have a plan. Boys, it's hunting season. Weapon up ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The mainstream media may have trouble resisting the temptation to declare that Karl Rove has been demoted, but the truth is quite the contrary. By giving up his role as deputy White House chief of staff, Rove has been freed to do what he does best: shape big issues and develop strategies to win elections. ~ Fred Barnes

The simple truth - every day is precious. When it's gone, it never comes back to you. ~ Emilie Barnes

When you read a good book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it"
- ~ Julia Barnes

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it. ~ Julian Barnes

[Louise Colet was a p]roto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy. ~ Julian Barnes