Quotes by Djuna Barnes

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

“The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the others bed, where the rival perfects the lovers imperfections.”

“Well, isnt 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?”

“Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.”

“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”

“We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasnt the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how lifes lived before it gets to the parlor door.”

“To love without criticism is to be betrayed.”

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

“Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.”

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

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 mens image is a figure of doom.

theres something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust

the ballerina on perfected toeSpins to the axis of a fortitudeThat is the sum of all her yesterdays.

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

...he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called strange. A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.

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

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

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.

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.