Djuna Barnes
Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.Collection: Dreams
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
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.
We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
Life is painful, nasty and short... in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.
A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.Collection: Men
There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.Collection: Shattered
Only the impossible lasts forever.Collection: Philosophical
No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into.Collection: Mind
Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.Collection: Life Is
The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.Collection: Curves
I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.Collection: Too Much
I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravishedCollection: Giving
Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.Collection: Flesh
Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.Collection: Lying
The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.Collection: Self
I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.Collection: Strange
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?Collection: Past
Destiny and history are untidy.Collection: Destiny
Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.Collection: Humble
A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?Collection: Men
The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage.Collection: Lying
She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time --because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.Collection: Sweet
Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.Collection: Taken
One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.Collection: Wish
Life, the permission to know death.Collection: Aging
New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.Collection: New York
No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.Collection: Men
I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.Collection: Humble
To think is to be sick.Collection: Thinking
There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?Collection: Honesty
Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.Collection: Men
Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.Collection: Funny
I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.Collection: Narrative
We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.Collection: Wind
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, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.Collection: War
The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.Collection: Next
When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder; one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston; one goes to the Bowery.Collection: Boston
Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.Collection: Sleep