Quotes from Djuna Barnes

Love is death, come upon with passion; I know, that is why love is wisdom. I love her as one condemned to it.

In her face was the tense expression of an organism surviving in an alien element.

Bend down the tree of knowledge and you'll unroost a strange bird.

Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes; this is its wonderful unhappiness...

Nora had the face of all people who love the people – a face that would be evil when she found out that to love without criticism is to be betrayed.

as if the air, by its very lightness, by its very non-resistance, were an almost insurmountable problem, making her body, though slight and compact, seem much heavier than that of women who stay upon the ground.

The needle that had made one the property of the child made the other the property of no man.

The way she said "dinner" and the way she said "champagne" gave meat and liquid their exact difference, as if by having surmounted two mediums, earth and air, her talent, running forward, achieved all others.

Wir setzen an dieser Stelle über den Fluss—

Man," she said, her eyelids quivering, "conditioning himself to fear, made God; as the prehistoric, conditioning itself to hope, made man—the cooling of the earth, the receding of the sea. And I, who want power, chose a girl who resembles a boy.

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

Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it's about nothing.

It's a gruesome thing that man learns only by what he has between the one leg and the other! Oh, that short dangle! We corrupt mortality by its industry.

She speaks of people taking away her 'faith' in them, as if faith were a transportable object—all her life she has been subject to the feeling of 'removal.

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

One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life – darkly seen.

How cruel is reason! How sharper than a serpent's tooth is meditation! How subtle is the lack of reason!

Nightwood is demanding. You can slide into it, because the prose has a narcotic quality, but you can't slide over it. The language is not about conveying information; it is about conveying meaning.

Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness;

As disquieted as if he were expected to "do something" to avert a catastrophe (as one is expected to do something about an overturned tumbler, the contents of which is about to drip over the edge of the table and into a lady's lap)…

I put my hand on the poor bitch of a cow and her hide was running water under my hand, like water tumbling down from Lahore, jerking against my hand as if she wanted to go, standing still in one spot; and I thought, there are directions and speeds that no one has calculated, for believe it or not that cow had gone somewhere very fast that we didn't know of, and yet was still standing there.

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 man's image is a figure of doom.

She was broad and tall, and though her skin was the skin of a child, there could be seen coming, early in her life, the design that was to be the weather-beaten grain of her face, that wood in the work; the tree coming forward in her, an undocumented record of time.

Ah!" he said. "Love, that terrible thing!