Djuna Barnes Quotations

Djuna Barnes was an American novelist, poet, and playwright.

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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 Home Club: For Servants Only, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (12 October 1913)

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.
- "The Songs of Synge: The Man Who Shaped His Life as He Shaped His Plays", in New York Morning Telegraph (18 February 1917)

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
- Greenwich Village as It Is, in Pearson’s Magazine (October 1916)

After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat.
- Greenwich Village as It Is, in Pearson’s Magazine (October 1916)

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?
- Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians, New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine (19 November 1916)

Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, "What's the use?" Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. ... Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born.
- When asked why she is "so dreadfully morbid", in an interview with Guido Bruno (December 1919)

Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
- Letter to Emily Holmes Coleman (February 2, 1934)

We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart.
- Quoted in "The Way of Transition : Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments" (2002) by William Bridges, p. 204

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.
- In a letter to Emily Coleman, as quoted in The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems : Selected Poems (2003), edited by Rebecca Loncraine, p. xi

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.
- Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?

I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat.
- Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
- Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?

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.
- Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?

The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
- Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?

One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
- Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls

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.
- Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls

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?
- Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
- Ch. 7 : Go Down, Matthew

A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
- Ch. 7 : Go Down, Matthew

She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good.
- Anatole Broyard (28 June 1980)