Quotes from Djuna Barnes

The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for the future, and am I to blame if I've turned up this time as I shouldn't have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as of a fishing schooner? And what do I get but a face on me like an old child's bottom - is that happiness, do you think?

To pay homeage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future.

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.

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?

There is a gap in "world pain" through which the singular falls continually and forever; a body falling in observable space, deprived of the privacy of disappearance; as if privacy, moving relentlessly away, by the very sustaining power of its withdrawal kept the body eternally moving downward, but in one place, and perpetually before the eye.

There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary that has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching.

Those who love everything, as those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the detraques, the paupers; their good is incommunicable, outwitted, being the rudiment of a life that has developed, as in man's body are found evidences of lost needs.

And me who seem curious because no one has seen me for a million years, and now I'm seen! Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty? Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven.

In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, arrested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours.

Love of two things often makes one thing right. Think of the fish racing the sea, their love of air and water turning them like wheels, their tails and teeth biting the water, their spines curved round the air.

Since her emotional reactions were without distinction, she had to fall back on the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and related, and over those she seemed to suffer and grow glad.

Everything can be used in a lifetime; I've discovered that.

Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon the head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.

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.

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 have to know how.

So then I whispered, 'What is this thing, Lord?' and I began to cry; the tears went like rain goes down on the world without touching the face of Heaven. Suddenly I realized that it was the first time in my life my tears were strange to me because they just went straight forward out of my eyes;

I like the prince who was reading a book when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him that it was time, and he, arising, laid a papercutter between the pages to keep his place and closed the book.

This would be a fine world, Lord, if you could get everybody out of it.

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.

The world and its history were to Nora like a ship in a bottle; she herself was outside and unidentified, endlessly embroiled in a preoccupation without a problem.

but this is another love—it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop—it rots me away.

blood-thirsty with love

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

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.