Djuna Barnes Quotes

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

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

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

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

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.

...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 was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.

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

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.

He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

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.

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.

there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust

To think is to be sick...