Djuna Barnes

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

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

"Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on."

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

"The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment."

"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."

"We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn’t the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life’s lived before it gets to the parlor door…"

"The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections."