Djuna Barnes: Quotes about life

Djuna Barnes was American Modernist writer, poet and artist. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Djuna Barnes: 78   quotes 1   like

“This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid.”

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
Context: 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.

“We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart.”

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

“One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.”

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

“Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.”

Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 7 : Go Down, Matthew