Best 75 quotes of Djuna Barnes on MyQuotes

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?

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

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

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

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

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

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

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

God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.

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.

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

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.

If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for - or ignored.

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

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

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

Life, the permission to know death.

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.

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?' For a moment he did not answer.  Taking up the decanter he held it to the light. 'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.'  She came toward him.  'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this.  Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Only the impossible lasts forever.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as 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.

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.

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

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

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.

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

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

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?

The Seal, she lounges like a bride,Much too docile, there's no doubt;Madame Récamier, on side,(if such she has), and bottom out.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

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