Djuna Barnes Quotes

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

Your life will be transformed when you make peace with your shadow.

I am still a person with a sense of superficiality that I'm trying to challenge.

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

Sometimes I may be totally arrogant, sometimes I may totally be the most humble guy you've ever met, sometimes I may be in between. But that's life. Who isn't like that? What's the big deal if I had an arrogant moment.

Revere thyself, and yet thyself despise.

I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals; I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am.

You can know what's in your life when you know what's in your heart.

I've been in therapy. I know enough about myself now to know that I really don't need to know anymore.

I try to find what is closest to me in the character. There's many sides to personality, but it's a matter of, do you entertain those specific areas of your personality, or are you afraid to entertain them?

I'm trying to figure myself out through my movies. Whether it's big stuff like what we're doing here, or little stuff like, 'Why aren't I happier?' With every film I feel like I'm apologising for something. I feel I'm most successful when I'm looking for something that embarrasses me about my character that I'd like to expose.

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that.

Those darker sides, the things that we don't want to admit about ourselves - that's what excites me.

If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.

I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me.

I was a highly sensitive kid, sort of an old soul, and I felt like a lot of people in my peer group didn't fully understand me, or I couldn't fully be myself. I just wasn't engaged in a way that was fulfilling me.

There's something really earnest inside me all the time. It's not a cool or fun way to be. Sometimes I would like to experience being someone who's not wired the way I'm wired.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?

How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole

We are not always even what we are most.