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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
Simply
Life
People
Brutish
Nasty
Short
More quotes by Djuna Barnes
I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
Djuna Barnes
When autumn shadows throw their patterns across the land, they are not the images of fragile, dying leaves, not the bared arms of lofty elms, not shadows of a fading summer but swinging shapes as of books upon a strap, of round and square boxes held under an arm, of hurrying little people heading towards the nearest school.
Djuna Barnes
Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
Djuna Barnes
We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
Djuna Barnes
To think is to be sick.
Djuna Barnes
Only the impossible lasts forever.
Djuna Barnes
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
Djuna Barnes
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.
Djuna Barnes
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.
Djuna Barnes
When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston one goes to the Bowery.
Djuna Barnes
Una's face was an unbroken block of calculation, saving where, upon her upper lip, a little down of hair fluttered. Yet it gave one an uncanny feeling. It made one think of a tassel on a hammer.
Djuna Barnes
Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
Djuna Barnes
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.
Djuna Barnes
To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
Djuna Barnes
The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
Djuna Barnes
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
Djuna Barnes
If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for - or ignored.
Djuna Barnes
Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
Djuna Barnes
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?
Djuna Barnes
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
Djuna Barnes