Djuna Barnes Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Djuna Barnes. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.
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Djuna Barnes
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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?
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pΓ’tΓ©; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
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Djuna Barnes
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To think is to be sick...
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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 ravished.
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Djuna Barnes
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Oh," he cried. "A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart!
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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.
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Djuna Barnes
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To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
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Djuna Barnes
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I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?
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Djuna Barnes
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Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?' For a moment he did not answer.Β  Taking up the decanter he held it to the light. 'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.'Β  She came toward him.Β  'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this.Β  Once I was remorseless, but this is another love β€” it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop β€” it rots me away.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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...
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Djuna Barnes
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle--the heart.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. 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 for it, and not its alchemy.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, β€œwho is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
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Ross Wetzsteon (Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960)
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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.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?
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Djuna Barnes
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Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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quoted Djuna Barnes: β€œToo great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.
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James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
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Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel.
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Djuna Barnes
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Our bones only ache while the flesh is on them. Stretch it 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 the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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...the people... they are church-broken, nation-broken -- they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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now I see that night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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For us, books have turned into fast food, to be consumed in the gaps between one bout of relentless living and the next. Airports, subways, maybe half an hour at bedtime, maybe something with the office sandwich, isn’t really ideal.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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God,' she cried, 'what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you prepare for that? Everything we can't bear in the world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.... There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purty's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?
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Djuna Barnes
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She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.
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Djuna Barnes
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No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible--it is a form of immortality
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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…everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget β€” the design of life; and good when we are forgotten β€” the design of death.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Looking down the barrel of your eye I see the body of a bloody Cinderella looking back.' Djuna Barnes
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Meg Tuite
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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.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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From the half-open doors of this chiffonier hung laces, ribands, stockings, ladies' underclothing and an abdominal brace, which gave the impression that the feminine finery had suffered venery.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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It does seem, in other words, not only more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a woman writer (which corresponds to the male situation of experimental writer vs. writer), but also peculiarly more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a male experimental writer. She may, if young, get caught up in a β€œmovement,” like Djuna Barnes, like H.D., like Laura Riding, as someone’s mistress, and then be forgotten, or if old, she maybe β€œadmitted” into a group, under a label, but never quite as seriously considered as the men in that group.
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Christine Brooke-Rose (Women Writing)
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There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she 'just loved Thelma.' Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it's politically maddening, but I've also always thought it a little romanticβ€”the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.
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Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)
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Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all...
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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The doctor lifted the bottle. β€œThank you,” said Felix. β€œI never drink spirits.” β€œYou will,” said the doctor.
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Djuna Barnes
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No man need curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.
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Djuna Barnes
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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it!
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Sometimes to be utterly innocent," he went on, "would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary.
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Djuna Barnes
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The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a 'picture' forever arranged, is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear,stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey. Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past; before her the structure of our head and jaws ache -- we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Das Leben ist ewig; darin liegt seine SchΓΆnheit.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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In the resurrection, when we come up looking backward at each other, I shall know you only of all that company.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say β€œLove” and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.
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Djuna Barnes
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His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly - as he must - on those two themes - whistles his tune.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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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've got to know how.' So I got to thinking and I said to myself, 'This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me -- be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Guido had lived as all Jews do, who, cut off from their people by accident or choice, find that they must inhabit a world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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...he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called 'strange.' A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections. Fancy gallops to take part in that duel, unconstrained by any certain articulation of the laws of that unseen game.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place-no matter from what place he has come-some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everythere from nowhere.
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Djuna Barnes
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I also know this,’ he went on: β€˜One cup poured into another makes different water; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another’s eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man’s smile would be consternation on another’s mouth. Rear up eternal river, here comes grief! Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! Laughing I came into Pacific Street, and laughing I’m going out of it; laughter is the pauper’s money.
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Djuna Barnes
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A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth!
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Djuna Barnes
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Nora aveva la faccia di tutti coloro che amano gli altri - una faccia che sarebbe diventata cattiva quando avrebbe scoperto che amare senza riserve Γ¨ essere traditi.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Β«Il tempo non Γ¨ abbastanza lungo! [...] Non Γ¨ abbastanza lungo per una vita che faccia dimenticare le sue notti.Β»
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Man makes his history with the one hand and "holds it up" with the other.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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A man is another personβ€”a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself. God laughs at me; but his laughter is my love.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn itβ€”infants, angels, priests, the dead; whyβ€”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.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you'll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her "escape" again. That's why she can't "put herself in another's place," she herself is the only "position"; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can't do anything in relation to anyone but herself.
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Djuna Barnes
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In Nora's heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora's blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be unloved, corrupt or put away. Robin was now beyond timely changes, except in the blood that animated her.
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Djuna Barnes
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There goes the dismantledβ€”Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman,” he thought to himself, β€œwithout the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman,” he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, β€œand love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere,” he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. β€œOut looking for what she’s afraid to findβ€”Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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You’ve got to listen! She would come back to me after a night all over the city and lie down beside me and she would say, β€˜I want to make everyone happy,’ and her mouth was drawn down. β€˜I want everyone to be gay, gay. Only you,’ she said, holding me, β€˜only you, you mustn’t be gay or happy, not like that, it’s not for you, only for everyone else in the world.’ She knew she was driving me insane with misery and fright; only,” she went on, β€œshe couldn’t do anything because she was a long way off and waiting to begin. It’s for that reason she hates everyone near her. It’s why she falls into everything, like someone in a dream. It’s why she wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. A shadow was falling on herβ€”mineβ€”and it was driving her out of her wits.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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We look to the East for a wisdom that we shall not use - and to the sleeper for the secret that we shall not find. So, I say, what of the night, the terrible night? The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart, and that night-fowl that caws against her spirit and yours, dropping between you and her the awful estrangement of his bowels. The drip of your tears in his implacable pulse. Night people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures. And where you go, it goes, the two of you, your living and her dead, that will not die; to daylight, to life, to grief, until both are carrion.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unraveling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor’s pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a peal: so he would have to cover the doctor. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Ah, mighty uncertainty!" said the doctor. "Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse-meat that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears. Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquenceβ€”and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he get’s the bum’s rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Β«Noi ci volgiamo all'Oriente in cerca di una saggezza che non useremo, e al dormiente in cerca del segreto che non scopriremo. E allora vi chiedo: com'Γ¨ la notte, la notte terribile? L'oscuritΓ  Γ¨ il rifugio dove va ad appollaiarsi il cuore dell'amata, ed Γ¨ l'uccello notturno che gracchia contro il suo spirito e il vostro, lasciando cadere in mezzo a voi l'orrenda estraneitΓ  delle sue viscere. Il gocciolio delle vostre lacrime Γ¨ il suo pulsare implacabile. Gli abitanti della notte non seppelliscono i loro morti, la creatura mondata del guscio dei suoi gesti essi l'appendono al collo a voi, sveglia, che siete la loro beneamata. E dovunque andiate, la creatura vi seguirΓ , voi coi vostri vivi, l'amata coi suoi morti, e non morirΓ  mai, verso la luce del giorno, verso la vita, verso il dolore, fino a che non sarete entrambe carogne.Β»
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Nora had the face of all people who love the people – a face that would be evil when she found out that to love without criticism is to be betrayed. Nora robbed herself for everyone; incapable of giving herself warning, she was continually turning about to find herself diminished. Wandering people the world over found her profitable in that she could be sold for a price forever, for she carried her betrayal money in her own pocket.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.
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Kate Zambreno
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We wake from our doings in a deep sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names with which to deny them. Their very lack of identity makes them ourselves. For by a street number, by a house, by a name, we cease to accuse ourselves. Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.
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Djuna Barnes
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In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humuours. ... When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together. Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear - if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused - might lose the scent of home.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
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Listen! Do things look in the ten and twelve of noon look as they do in the dark? Is the hand, the face, the foot, the same face and hand and foot seen by the sun? For now the hand lies in a shadow; its beauties and its deformities are in a smoke - there is a sickle of doubt across the cheek bone thrown by the hat's brim, so there is half a face to be peered back into speculation. A leaf of darkness has fallen under the chin and lies deep upon the arches of the eyes; the eyes themselves have changed their colour. The very mother's head you swore by in the dock is a heavier head, crowned with ponderable hair.
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Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)