Djuna Barnes Quotes

52 quotes in 690 categories

• The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.
• Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
• We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
• When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty elms,…
• Life, the permission to know death.
• Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.
• Only the impossible lasts forever.
• To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
• Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
• A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.
• We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
• Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?
• My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like,…
• And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
• New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
• The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
• No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into...
• Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.
• Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word…
• I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.

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