Djuna Barnes Quotes

Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are all possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.

Life is never guaranteed to be safe, so we better use it while we are still in good condition.

Man is a transitory being, and his designs must partake of the imperfections their author.

God, to prevent all escape, hath sown the seeds of death in our very constitution and nature, so that we can as soon run from ourselves, as run from death. We need no feller to come with a hand of violence and hew us down; there is in the tree a worm, which grows out of its own substance, that will destroy it; so in us, those infirmities of nature that will bring us down to the dust.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

People of the world will reject your reminders, because it reminds them that this world is temporary.

We're all gonna lie, we're all gonna cry, and we're all gonna take painful shits.

The grave is sooner cloy'd than men's desire.

Every man is important if he loses his life;and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.

Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.

To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.

Good intentions are very mortal and perishable things. Like very mellow and choice fruit, they are difficult to keep.

If thy friends tire of thee, remember that it is human to tire of everything.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

The only truly consistent are the dead.

Feast, and your halls are crowded Fast, and the world goes by Succeed and give, and it helps you live But no man can help you die

Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.

The animals to whom nature has given the faculty we call cunning know always when to use it, and use it wisely; but when man descends to cunning he blunders and betrays.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.

People are born soft and weak. They die hard and stiff.

To Contemplation's sober eye. / Such is the race of Man.

You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.