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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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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
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Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
Djuna Barnes
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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
Djuna Barnes
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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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Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
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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Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
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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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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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
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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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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I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
Djuna Barnes
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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
Djuna Barnes
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
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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?
Djuna Barnes
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An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
Djuna Barnes
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I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
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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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
Djuna Barnes