Quote

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Djuna Barnes

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Djuna Barnes
Age: 90 †
Born: 1892
Born: June 12
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Cornwall on Hudson
New York
Lydia Steptoe
Joy
Unendurable
Curve
Curves
Beginning

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

Image
Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
Djuna Barnes
Image
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.
Djuna Barnes
Image
No man needs curing of his individual sickness his universal malady is what he should look to.
Djuna Barnes
Image
I've seen death and I didn't like it.
Djuna Barnes
Image
My war brought me many things let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.
Djuna Barnes
Image
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?
Djuna Barnes
Image
Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
Djuna Barnes
Image
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.
Djuna Barnes
Image
Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
Djuna Barnes
Image
When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty elms, not shadows of a fading summer but swinging shapes as of books upon a strap, of round and square boxes held under an arm, of hurrying little people heading towards the nearest school.
Djuna Barnes
Image
Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy
Djuna Barnes
Image
For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
Djuna Barnes
Image
To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
Djuna Barnes
Image
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
Djuna Barnes
Image
After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
Djuna Barnes
Image
And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
Djuna Barnes
Image
Only the impossible lasts forever.
Djuna Barnes
Image
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
Image
One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
Djuna Barnes
Image
To think is to be sick.
Djuna Barnes