Quotes from Djuna Barnes

God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!

To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.

The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.

A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won't stick out.

Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woolen table-spread, a color at once strange and attractive, an obstinate color, a color that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead...

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

My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. 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.

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.

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

For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

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

Life, the permission to know death.

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

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won't stick out.

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.