Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barneswas an American writer and artist best known for her novel Nightwood, a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 June 1892
CityStorm King Mountain, NY
CountryUnited States of America
lying love-is firsts
Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.
destiny
Destiny and history are untidy.
strange forgotten said
I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
giving silence littles
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
too-much miserable made
I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
war hands mind
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.
summer book school
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, not shadows of a fading summer; but swinging shapes as of books upon a strap, of round and square boxes held under an arm, of hurrying little people heading towards the nearest school.
taken heart love-is
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.
thinking brides
Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?
girl doors salad
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.
endurance ruins depravity
What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
moving night fire
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 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.
writing foolish draws
I can draw and write, and you'd be foolish not to hire me.
self truth-is shocking
The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.