Djuna Barnes Quotes

I guess I look like a rock quarry that someone has dynamited.

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

For you know only a heap of broken images

I was like a clock that had exploded- my springs were hanging out, my hands were cockeyed, and my numbers were falling off.

Wars break things; they break stories.

The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

We are like Humpty Dumpty and all these king's horses and all these king's men cannot put us back together again

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

I don’t think there’s enough of her left.

My life is not packaged, Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged Edges that cut even my friends.

Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.

I killed the whole world, and you can too, if you try hard.

We broke the world to make it whole.

Create havoc, create destruction.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

Glass, China, and Reputation, are easily cracked, and never well mended.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.