DJUNA BARNES

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

To love without criticism is to be betrayed.

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

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

After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.

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.

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?

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

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

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

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.

Life is painful, nasty and short... in my case it has only been painful and nasty.

Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.

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

Destiny and history are untidy.

Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.

“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

I've seen death and I didn't like it.

Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.

When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder; one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston; one goes to the Bowery.

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.