His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always…

“There goes the dismantled—Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman,” he thought to himself, “without the joy and safety of the Catholic…

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.

— Djuna Barnes

My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you…

— Djuna Barnes

When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder; one gets a…

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

“The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry,…

— Djuna Barnes

God,' she cried, 'what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She…

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

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

— Djuna Barnes

When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty…

— Djuna Barnes

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still…

— Djuna Barnes

“I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say “Love” and twitch like the lopped leg…

— Djuna Barnes

“Those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches…

— Djuna Barnes

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…

— Djuna Barnes