179 Quotes by Djuna Barnes

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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