30 quotes
New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
Nightwood (1936)
One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
Nightwood (1936)
I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.
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.
Nightwood (1936)
A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
Nightwood (1936)
Destiny and history are untidy.
Nightwood (1936)
The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
Nightwood (1936)
I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat.
Nightwood (1936)
Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
Nightwood (1936)
This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid.
After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat.
The Seal, she lounges like a bride,
Much too docile, there's no doubt;
Madame Récamier, on side,
(if such she has), and bottom out.
Creatures in an Alphabet (1982)
A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself — and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?
Nightwood (1936)
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart.
The Way of Transition : Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments (2002)
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.
Nightwood (1936)
Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.
Nightwood (1936)
Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
Somewhere beneath her hurried curse,
A corpse lies bounding in a hearse;
And friends and relatives disperse,
And are not stirred.
The Book of Repulsive Women (1915)
The jests that lit our hours by night
And made them gay,
Soiled a sweet and ignorant soul
And fouled its play.
The Book of Repulsive Women (1915)