Quotes from Djuna Barnes

Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel.

Those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary.

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

For us, books have turned into fast food, to be consumed in the gaps between one bout of relentless living and the next. Airports, subways, maybe half an hour at bedtime, maybe something with the office sandwich, isn't really ideal.

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

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.

Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.

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.

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

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

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.

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

From the half-open doors of this chiffonier hung laces, ribands, stockings, ladies' underclothing and an abdominal brace, which gave the impression that the feminine finery had suffered venery.

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.

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

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

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

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

Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly - as he must - on those two themes - whistles his tune.

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 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.

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

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.

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