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
law produce certainty
Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
block thinking hair
Una's face was an unbroken block of calculation, saving where, upon her upper lip, a little down of hair fluttered. Yet it gave one an uncanny feeling. It made one think of a tassel on a hammer.
uncles mean hard-work
Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form ...
new-york men water
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.
data age causes
Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
life-is you-like-it loud
Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
acceptance past age
In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.
shattered surface whole
There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.
necks throat
After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
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.
men pounds philosopher
You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.
children riding red
God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
people nasty life-is
For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
humble men identity
Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.