“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.
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Djuna Barnes 39
American Modernist writer, poet and artist 1892–1982Related quotes
“Here is bread, which strengthens man's heart, and therefore called the staff of life.”
Psalm 104.
Commentaries
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft