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.

— Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes Quotes

Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?

— Djuna Barnes

For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes

So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.

— Djuna Barnes

Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.

— Djuna Barnes

Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the ‘forbidden’ when we have not understood it all...

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes

No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible – it is a form of immortality.

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes

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!

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes

I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you’ll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other that they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on, eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin.

— Djuna Barnes

Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly – as he must – on those two themes – whistles his tune.

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes

But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection.

— Djuna Barnes

Sometimes to be utterly innocent,” he went on, “would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.

— Djuna Barnes

Growing old is just a matter of throwing life away back; so you finally forgive even those that you have not begun to forget. It is that indifference which gives you your courage, which to tell the truth is no courage at all.

— Djuna Barnes

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.

— Djuna Barnes
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