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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

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
Curves
Beginning
Joy
Unendurable
Curve

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

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I've seen death and I didn't like it.
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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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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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The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
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Only the impossible lasts forever.
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
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Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
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Love is the first lie wisdom the last.
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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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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
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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.
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I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into.
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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Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
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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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
Djuna Barnes
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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?
Djuna Barnes