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For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

Djuna Barnes

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Djuna Barnes
Age: 90 †
Born: 1892
Born: June 12
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Cornwall on Hudson
New York
Lydia Steptoe
Nasty
Short
Simply
Life
People
Brutish

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The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
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Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
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My war brought me many things let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.
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Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
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I've seen death and I didn't like it.
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I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
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God, children know something they can't tell they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.
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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
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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?
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I couldn't ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap it wouldn't even fill up the hole that the mice came through.
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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
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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.
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New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
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Madness to us means reversion to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.
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After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
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