Djuna Barnes Quotes

“She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.”
― Djuna Barnes

“His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.”
― Kate Zambreno

“Man makes his history with the one hand and "holds it up" with the other.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“His fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan; some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer."
--from "La Somnambule" (1937) by Djuna Barnes”
― Shaun Whiteside, Paris Stories

“Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness;”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“She speaks of people taking away her ‘faith’ in them, as if faith were a transportable object—all her life she has been subject to the feeling of ‘removal.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood