Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982)
American novelist, poet, and playwright.
Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
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?
One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
Somewhere beneath her hurried curse,
A corpse lies bounding in a hearse;
And friends and relatives disperse,
And are not stirred.
I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat.
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.
What turn of body, what of lust
Undiced?
So we've worshipped you a little
More than Christ.
There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.
After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat.
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.
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart.
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.