Quote

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?

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
Liars
Evil
Purity
Black
Honesty
Something
Seeking
Backside
Always
Loves
Backsides
Love
Door
Horrid
Doors
Degradation
Liar
Gone

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

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I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
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Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
Djuna Barnes
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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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A man's sorrow runs uphill true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.
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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.
Djuna Barnes
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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.
Djuna Barnes
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One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
Djuna Barnes
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No man needs curing of his individual sickness his universal malady is what he should look to.
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After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
Djuna Barnes
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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
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Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
Djuna Barnes
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God, children know something they can't tell they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
Djuna Barnes
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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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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
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The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.
Djuna Barnes
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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
Djuna Barnes
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Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
Djuna Barnes
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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.
Djuna Barnes
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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
Djuna Barnes
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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