Top 80 Djuna Barnes Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The truth is how you say it, and to be ‘one’s self’ is the most shocking custom of all.”

— Djuna Barnes

52. “Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.”

— Djuna Barnes

53. “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.”

— Djuna Barnes

54. “And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?”

— Djuna Barnes

55. “I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.”

— Djuna Barnes

56. “When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder; one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston; one goes to the Bowery.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

58. “I couldn’t ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap; it wouldn’t even fill up the hole that the mice came through...”

— Djuna Barnes

59. “Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?”

— Djuna Barnes

60. “Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.”

— Djuna Barnes

61. “I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how 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 that they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on, eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin.”

— Djuna Barnes

62. “Well, isn’t Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else – and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?”

— Djuna Barnes

63. “So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.”

— Djuna Barnes

64. “Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

— Djuna Barnes

65. “Una’s face was an unbroken block of calculation, saving where, upon her upper lip, a little down of hair fluttered. Yet it gave one an uncanny feeling. It made one think of a tassel on a hammer.”

— Djuna Barnes

66. “But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection.”

— Djuna Barnes

67. “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...”

— Djuna Barnes

68. “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.”

— Djuna Barnes

69. “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.”

— Djuna Barnes

70. “Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?”

— Djuna Barnes

71. “She said to herself: ‘Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it – infants, angels, priests, the dead; why – should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?’ She thought: ‘He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony.”

— Djuna Barnes

72. “Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.”

— Djuna Barnes

73. “We are adhering to life now with our last muscle – the heart.”

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

75. “Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel.”

— Djuna Barnes

76. “A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother’s Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth!”

— Djuna Barnes

77. “For us, books have turned into fast food, to be consumed in the gaps between one bout of relentless living and the next. Airports, subways, maybe half an hour at bedtime, maybe something with the office sandwich, isn’t really ideal.”

— Djuna Barnes

78. “Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you’ll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her “escape” again. That’s why she can’t “put herself in another’s place,” she herself is the only “position”; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can’t do anything in relation to anyone but herself.”

— Djuna Barnes

79. “She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time – because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it.”

— Djuna Barnes

80. “So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder.”

— Djuna Barnes

81. “Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the ‘forbidden’ when we have not understood it all...”

— Djuna Barnes

82. “She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time – because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.”

— Djuna Barnes

83. “The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections. Fancy gallops to take part in that duel, unconstrained by any certain articulation of the laws of that unseen game.”

— Djuna Barnes

84. “Sometimes to be utterly innocent,” he went on, “would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.”

— Djuna Barnes

85. “Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly – as he must – on those two themes – whistles his tune.”

— Djuna Barnes

86. “In the resurrection, when we come up looking backward at each other, I shall know you only of all that company.”

— Djuna Barnes

87. “Growing old is just a matter of throwing life away back; so you finally forgive even those that you have not begun to forget. It is that indifference which gives you your courage, which to tell the truth is no courage at all.”

— Djuna Barnes