Quotes from Nightwood

“The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“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, quote from Nightwood

“She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time --because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. 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, quote from Nightwood

“To think is to be sick...”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?'
For a moment he did not answer.  Taking up the decanter he held it to the light.
'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.'  She came toward him.  'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this.  Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“Oh," he cried. "A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart!”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“To our friends,' he answered, 'we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“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, quote from Nightwood

“Our bones only ache while the flesh is on them. Stretch it thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“We are adhering to life now with our last muscle--the heart.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“And once Father Lucas said to me, 'Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough -- you've got to know how.' So I got to thinking and I said to myself, 'This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me -- be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a 'picture' forever arranged, is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear,stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.
Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past; before her the structure of our head and jaws ache -- we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

“...the people... they are church-broken, nation-broken -- they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct.”
― Djuna Barnes, quote from Nightwood

About the author

Popular quotes

“something about the curve of his lips was more intimate than any touch.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, quote from The Naturals

“Remember how mean you where when we first met? Piper laughed and Conrad smiled and tentativly relaxed. Boy did you ever have everyone fooled because you're about the nicest person I ever met. Conrad blushed.”
― Victoria Forester, quote from The Girl Who Could Fly

“Te quiero, Jacinda, con todo mi ser y con todo mi aliento.”
― Sophie Jordan, quote from Hidden

“But sticking to rules just because they're there does not make them right. You need to learn when the rules should be broken.”
― Ilsa J. Bick, quote from Ashes

“Society demands that he limit himself to his function… There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, quote from Being and Nothingness

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.