Nightwood Quotes

“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, Nightwood

“Those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary.”
― Djuna Barnes

“No man need curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.”
― Djuna Barnes

“I also know this,’ he went on: ‘One cup poured into another makes different water; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another’s eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man’s smile would be consternation on another’s mouth. Rear up eternal river, here comes grief! Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! Laughing I came into Pacific Street, and laughing I’m going out of it; laughter is the pauper’s money.”
― Djuna Barnes

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

“No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place-no matter from what place he has come-some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everythere from nowhere.”
― Djuna Barnes

“We wake from our doings in a deep sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names with which to deny them. Their very lack of identity makes them ourselves. For by a street number, by a house, by a name, we cease to accuse ourselves. 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.”
― Djuna Barnes

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

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

“Selles voodis oleksime unustanud oma elu, oleksime jõudnud mäletamise äärmise piirini; me kehad oleksid ühte sulanud, justnagu kujud vahakujude muuseumis on sulatatud ühte nende ajalooga, nii oleksime meie lagunenud armastuseks.”
― 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