Quotes from Djuna Barnes

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

Sometimes to be utterly innocent," he went on, "would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.

Guido had lived as all Jews do, who, cut off from their people by accident or choice, find that they must inhabit a world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace.

Das Leben ist ewig; darin liegt seine Schönheit.

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

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.

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.

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.

No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place-no matter from what place he has come-some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everythere from nowhere.

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!

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

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

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.

But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection.

In the resurrection, when we come up looking backward at each other, I shall know you only of all that company.

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

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.

Growing old is just a matter of throwing life away back; so you finally forgive even those that you have not begun to forget. It is that indifference which gives you your courage, which to tell the truth is no courage at all.

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

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

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.

Nora aveva la faccia di tutti coloro che amano gli altri - una faccia che sarebbe diventata cattiva quando avrebbe scoperto che amare senza riserve è essere traditi.

Il tempo non è abbastanza lungo! [...] Non è abbastanza lungo per una vita che faccia dimenticare le sue notti.»

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger.