The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.
Djuna BarnesRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the transformative and consuming nature of deep love, highlighting its power to shape identity and memory.
In this quote, Nora expresses to Matthew the profound impact that love has had on her life, suggesting that it can change one's sense of self. She contrasts her current state of being, burdened by memories and the weight of love, with Robin's ability to be free and unencumbered, revealing the dual nature of love as both liberating and imprisoning.
Themes
LoveIdentityMemoryTransformationPain
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the complexities of romantic relationships.
More from Djuna Barnes
All quotes →Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.
Djuna BarnesRead
“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”
Djuna BarnesRead
Similar quotes
The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations - all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.
David LevithanRead
There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer: no disease that love will not heal: no door that enough love will not open...It makes no difference how deep set the trouble: how hopeless the outlook: how muddled the tangle: how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.
Emmet FoxRead
Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)
Jack KerouacRead
I purified my lips with sacred fire that I might speak of love, but when I opened my mouth to speak, I found myself mute.
Khalil GibranRead
Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.
Tony KushnerRead
What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.
Gabriel Garcia MarquezRead