Top 80 Djuna Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.”

— Djuna Barnes

Featured in: Breakup Quotes

2. “Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.”

— Djuna Barnes

3. “There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.”

— Djuna Barnes

4. “A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”

— Djuna Barnes

5. “I’ve seen death and I didn’t like it.”

— Djuna Barnes

6. “Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

9. “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.”

— Djuna Barnes

10. “Destiny and history are untidy.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

12. “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?”

— Djuna Barnes

13. “The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”

— Djuna Barnes

14. “God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”

— Djuna Barnes

15. “The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.”

— Djuna Barnes

16. “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?”

— Djuna Barnes

17. “To love without criticism is to be betrayed.”

— Djuna Barnes

18. “I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.”

— Djuna Barnes

19. “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.”

— Djuna Barnes

20. “Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.”

— Djuna Barnes

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

21. “Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.”

— Djuna Barnes

22. “Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?”

— Djuna Barnes

23. “Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

25. “Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.”

— Djuna Barnes

26. “One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another’s eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man’s smile would be consternation on another’s mouth.”

— Djuna Barnes

27. “Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

29. “After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat.”

— Djuna Barnes

30. “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.”

— Djuna Barnes

31. “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 men’s image is a figure of doom.”

— Djuna Barnes

32. “I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.”

— Djuna Barnes

33. “I have been loved,′ she said, ’by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”

— Djuna Barnes

34. “One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

36. “No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible – it is a form of immortality.”

— Djuna Barnes

37. “Life, the permission to know death.”

— Djuna Barnes

38. “I can draw and write, and you’d be foolish not to hire me.”

— Djuna Barnes

39. “An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

41. “Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.”

— Djuna Barnes

42. “The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.”

— Djuna Barnes

43. “Only the impossible lasts forever.”

— Djuna Barnes

44. “One’s life is peculiar to one’s own when one has invented it.”

— Djuna Barnes

45. “New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.”

— Djuna Barnes

46. “What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?”

— Djuna Barnes

47. “To think is to be sick...”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

49. “No one will be much or little except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into...”

— Djuna Barnes

50. “The truth is how you say it, and to be ‘one’s self’ is the most shocking custom of all.”

— Djuna Barnes