Quote

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

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
Painful
Case
Short
Cases
Funny
Life
Nasty

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

Image
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
Djuna Barnes
Image
I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
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
And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
Djuna Barnes
Image
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.
Djuna Barnes
Image
There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?
Djuna Barnes
Image
No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into.
Djuna Barnes
Image
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
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
New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.
Djuna Barnes
Image
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
Djuna Barnes
Image
Only the impossible lasts forever.
Djuna Barnes
Image
I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
Djuna Barnes
Image
What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
Djuna Barnes
Image
For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
Djuna Barnes
Image
I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
Djuna Barnes
Image
The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.
Djuna Barnes
Image
To think is to be sick.
Djuna Barnes
Image
Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
Djuna Barnes
Image
Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
Djuna Barnes