Zitate von Djuna Barnes

Quelle: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls

Quelle: Nightwood

Quelle: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls
Kontext: In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

From Third Avenue On
The Book of Repulsive Women (1915)
Kontext: Somewhere beneath her hurried curse,
A corpse lies bounding in a hearse;
And friends and relatives disperse,
And are not stirred.

When asked why she is "so dreadfully morbid", in an interview with Guido Bruno (December 1919) http://www.case.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/brandelmcdaniel/index/interviews.htm
Kontext: Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, "What's the use?" Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. … Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born.

What Do You See, Madam? (1932)
Kontext: If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.
It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for — or ignored.

To a Cabaret Dancer
The Book of Repulsive Women (1915)
Kontext: p>We watched her come with subtle fire
And learned feet,
Stumbling among the lustful drunk
Yet somehow sweet. We saw the crimson leave her cheeks
Flame in her eyes;
For when a woman lives in awful haste
A woman dies. The jests that lit our hours by night
And made them gay,
Soiled a sweet and ignorant soul
And fouled its play.</p

Quelle: Nightwood

Quelle: Nightwood

Quelle: Nightwood

Quelle: Nightwood

Quoted in "The Way of Transition : Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments" (2002) by William Bridges, p. 204

Quelle: Nightwood

Quelle: Nightwood

Quelle: Nightwood

The Home Club: For Servants Only, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (12 October 1913)

Greenwich Village as It Is, in Pearson’s Magazine (October 1916)

Quelle: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?