Daily Inspiration Quote by Djuna Barnes

Night arrives here not as comfort but as a kind of violence: a skin yanked over the face of day. Barnes doesn’t let darkness simply “fall.” She makes it tactile, intimate, and cruel, turning the sunset into an act of suffocation. The image is grotesque in a deliberate way. Skin is both protection and evidence of vulnerability; to pull it over someone’s head is to mute them, blind them, make their own body the instrument of constraint. Day isn’t ended, it’s hooded.

The startling twist is the motive clause: “that the day may be in torment.” Night isn’t a natural cycle; it’s an antagonist with intent. Barnes projects psychology onto the cosmos, a move that feels less like pathetic fallacy and more like indictment. The universe becomes complicit in cruelty, which is classic Barnes: eros and suffering tangled so tightly they’re hard to separate. The sentence carries the claustrophobia of her fiction, where desire often arrives as pressure, and beauty is never far from degradation.

Context matters. Barnes wrote out of modernism’s distrust of tidy moral order, and out of a lived knowledge of nightlife, secrecy, and social punishment (especially around queer intimacy). Darkness in Barnes is rarely just romantic; it’s where you’re allowed to exist and where you’re most at risk. By making night a deliberate tormentor, she hints at the perversity of a world that “covers” what it cannot tolerate. The line works because it’s cosmology as emotional reality: the body, the city, and the psyche all speaking in the same brutal metaphor.