Djuna Barnes Quotes

A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?

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

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one's nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

My dark side, my shadow, my lower companion is now in the back room blowing up balloons for kids' parties.

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.

The Jungian therapist taught me the difference between the ego and the shadow. I realized I'd been so busy being a good girl that I'd completely detached from my shadow. It's something we all have, and it's where all the creative juices are.

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

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

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

You must be willing to examine and explore your dark side. You must acknowledge how bad you can be and how horribly unloving you can behave. When you know how deep and dark your dark side is, it helps you stand a little taller in the light.

Reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we have relegated to the shadow is the most reliable path to actualizing all of our human potential.

You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.

True healing comes from owning and accepting all of life's energies within ourselves....When they are allowed to be expressed, they take their places as important facets of our nature. There is no split between 'good' and 'bad.'

Everybody has a lot of darkness in them because without that you're not a whole person.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

So many people go through life, and they never deal with their own issues, no matter what the issues are - ours happen to be gender identity. But, how many people go through life and just waste an entire life 'cause they'd never deal with themselves to be who they are.

I'm a big believer in the notion that our greatest potential lies in our darkest parts. To a certain extent it's only in facing those parts of ourselves that we can truly grow, and I think that's true of all of the characters I've played, certainly in the past few years.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

Resistance to revelation, resistance to becoming conscious of all that dwells within us - high and low, light and dark - is the anti-change factor. It is also the mainspring of all our psychological fears.

I want to show all sides of myself. I mean, I don't want to howl at the moon my whole life, you know?

When I was in my 20s, I thought I knew who I was. And then as soon as I turned 30, I realized that person has bruises and bumps and dark parts. And you kind of go, well, that's it. I'd rather embrace it than force myself to change.

We are all on a journey to mastering our inner peace.

I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.

I feel more comfortable with myself now. I don't know if I feel sexier. I feel more whole.