Djuna Barnes Quotes

When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.

But death's acquisitive instincts will win.

When you really deep down look at it, we go to bed every night, get up every morning, stay here for 70 or 80 years, and then we die.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.

It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it's the most beautiful thing we have in our lives - time.

Oh, the years fly by, that's just natural.

We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.

Death is an absolute marvel.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

We will all, someday, experience death, and become obsolete as a dead leaf falling from a tree, crushed by passersby to ashes underlying the earth.

As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.

Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

There is no more final end than death.

Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly; to every day we live, a day we die.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

These trees and these old people have one thing in common, they're both going in the ground soon!

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

Our birth is nothing but our death begun, As tapers waste the moment they take fire.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die.