Top 77 Quotes & Sayings by Djuna Barnes

A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.

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.

After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

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

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

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

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

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?

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.

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

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

The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

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

I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.

Only the impossible lasts forever.

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.

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

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

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

Destiny and history are untidy.

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.

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.

Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

To think is to be sick.

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

I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.

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?

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

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

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

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

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

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

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.

The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.

The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage.

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

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

Life, the permission to know death.

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.

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

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

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

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

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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