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Nightwood

Djuna Barnes

Top 10 Best Quotes

“The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”

“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”

“I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”

“Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.”

“There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?”

“She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time --because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.”

“I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.”

“You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.”

“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. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy.”

“Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?' For a moment he did not answer.  Taking up the decanter he held it to the light. 'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.'  She came toward him.  'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this.  Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.”

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Book Keywords:

love, solitude, nightwood, pain

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