Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982)
American novelist, poet, and playwright.
She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good.
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.
Complex in her privacy, refusing to be controlled by an audience or pinioned to a single representation, she once told Henry Ramont of the the New York Times, "I used to be invited by people who said, 'Get Djuna for dinner, she's amusing.' So I stopped it."
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.
Contemporary writers and artists praised her style, feared her tongue; she was a beauty, but a talented, acerbic, and powerfully intelligent one.
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.
A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
What turn of card, what trick of game
Undiced?
And you we valued still a little
More than Christ.
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
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.
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?
Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
Someday beneath some hard
Capricious star —
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We'll know you for the woman
That you are.
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 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.
We watched her come with subtle fire
And learned feet,
Stumbling among the lustful drunk
Yet somehow sweet.
Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
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.
Destiny and history are untidy.