Quotes from Djuna Barnes

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. Nora robbed herself for everyone; incapable of giving herself warning, she was continually turning about to find herself diminished. Wandering people the world over found her profitable in that she could be sold for a price forever, for she carried her betrayal money in her own pocket.

I'm telling you of French nights at the moment," the doctor went on, "and why we all go into them. The night and the day are two travels, and the French - gut-greedy and fist-tight though they often are - alone leave testimony of the two in the dawn; we tear up the one for the sake of the other; not so the French.

As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce.

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 they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on and eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as 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 may be in torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.

The doctor looked at her. "For the lover, it is the night into which his beloved goes," he said, "that destroys his heart; he wakes her suddenly, only to look the hyena in the face that is her smile, as she leaves that company.

One's life is peculiarly one's own when one has invented it.

L'amore diventa il sedimento del cuore, del tutto analogo ai "reperti" di una tomba. Come in questa si può tracciare il posto preso dal corpo, dalle vesti, dagli utensili necessari all'altra sua vita, così nel cuore dell'amante si ritrova, come un'ombra indelebile, l'impronta di ciò che ama.

I remember young Austrian boys going to school, flocks of quail they were, sitting out their recess in different spots in the sun, rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, with damp rosy mouths, smelling of the herd childhood, facts of history glimmering in their minds like sunlight, soon to be lost, soon to be forgotten, degraded into proof. Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.

Amore di donna per una donna... Che insana smania di sofferenza non lenita e di maternità l'ha mai portato alla mente?»

The only people who really know anything about medical science are the nurses, and they never tell; they'd get slapped if they did. But the great doctor, he's a divine idiot and a wise man.

Quando regaliamo una bambola a una bambina, le regaliamo la morte - è l'effige e il sudario; quando una donna la regala a una donna, è la vita che esse non possono avere, è la loro figlia, sacra e profana.»

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

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

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?

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

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.

We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.

To think is to be sick...

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.

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