179 Quotes by Djuna Barnes

I'm telling you of French nights at the moment," the doctor went on, "and why we all go into them. The night and the day are two travels, and the French - gut-greedy and fist-tight though they often are - alone leave testimony of the two in the dawn; we tear up the one for the sake of the other; not so the French.

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 may be in torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.

I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you'll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other that they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on, eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin.

And once Father Lucas said to me, 'Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough - you have to know how.

There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary that has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching.

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.

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

…everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget — the design of life; and good when we are forgotten — the design of death.

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