Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982)
American novelist, poet, and playwright.
Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
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?
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.
New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
What turn of card, what trick of game
Undiced?
And you we valued still a little
More than Christ.
A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
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.
Contemporary writers and artists praised her style, feared her tongue; she was a beauty, but a talented, acerbic, and powerfully intelligent one.
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.
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."
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.