Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982)
American novelist, poet, and playwright.
We watched her come with subtle fire
And learned feet,
Stumbling among the lustful drunk
Yet somehow sweet.
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.
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart.
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.
After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat.
There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.
What turn of body, what of lust
Undiced?
So we've worshipped you a little
More than Christ.
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.
I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat.
Somewhere beneath her hurried curse,
A corpse lies bounding in a hearse;
And friends and relatives disperse,
And are not stirred.
One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
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?
Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
Destiny and history are untidy.
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.
Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good.
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.
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.
Someday beneath some hard
Capricious star —
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We'll know you for the woman
That you are.