Djuna Barnes

“Life is painful, nasty and short... in my case it has only been painful and nasty.”

“New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.”

“After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.”

“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.”

“None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.”

“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.”

“The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.”

“An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.”

“She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it—infants, angels, priests, the dead; why—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.”

“there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust”

“I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”

“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?”

“To love without criticism is to be betrayed.”

“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.”

“We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.”

“Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.”

“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.”

“The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.”

“To think is to be sick...”

“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.”