179 Quotes by Djuna Barnes

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger.

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

Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon the head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.

You know what man really desires?" inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. "One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.

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.

Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woolen table-spread, a color at once strange and attractive, an obstinate color, a color that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead...

When a Jew dies on a Christian bosom he dies impaled.

To think is to be sick.

In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, arrested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours.