Happy birthday, Djuna Barnes! Here are some quotes from her writing.
“‘An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.'”
“[T]o love without criticism is to be betrayed.”
“‘So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.'”
“‘None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.'”
“‘[H]ave you ever loved someone and it became yourself?'”
“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death.”
“The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”
“A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.”
“There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.”
“The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.”
John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
