Djuna Barnes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class. It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for — or ignored."

"Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on."

"Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?"

"The Seal, she lounges like a bride, Much too docile, there's no doubt; Madame Récamier, on side, (if such she has), and bottom out."

"We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart."

"There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole."

"Someday beneath some hard Capricious star — Spreading its light a little Over far, We'll know you for the woman That you are."

"What turn of card, what trick of game Undiced? And you we valued still a little More than Christ."

"Ah God! she settles down we say; It means her powers slip away It means she draws back day by day From good or bad."

"Somewhere beneath her hurried curse, A corpse lies bounding in a hearse; And friends and relatives disperse, And are not stirred."

"What turn of body, what of lust Undiced? So we've worshipped you a little More than Christ."

"One sees you sitting in the sun Asleep; With the sweeter gifts you had And didn't keep, One grieves that the altars of Your vice lie deep."

"We watched her come with subtle fire And learned feet, Stumbling among the lustful drunk Yet somehow sweet. We saw the crimson leave her cheeks Flame in her eyes; For when a woman lives in awful haste A woman dies. The jests that lit our hours by night And made them gay, Soiled a sweet and ignorant soul And fouled its play."

"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."

"I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat."

"Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact."

"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."

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

"One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it."

"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."

"Destiny and history are untidy."

"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?"

"Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself."

"A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same."

"Contemporary writers and artists praised her style, feared her tongue; she was a beauty, but a talented, acerbic, and powerfully intelligent one."

"Complex in her privacy, refusing to be controlled by an audience or pinioned to a single representation, she once told Henry Ramont of the New York Times, "I used to be invited by people who said, 'Get Djuna for dinner, she's amusing.' So I stopped it.""

"She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good."