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Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
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
Painful
Case
Short
Cases
Funny
Life
More quotes by Djuna Barnes
The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.
Djuna Barnes
One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.
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
We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
Djuna Barnes
God, children know something they can't tell they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
Djuna Barnes
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
Djuna Barnes
What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
Djuna Barnes
Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
Djuna Barnes
Only the impossible lasts forever.
Djuna Barnes
New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
Djuna Barnes
An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
Djuna Barnes
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.
Djuna Barnes
I've seen death and I didn't like it.
Djuna Barnes
I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
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
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
I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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
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
For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
Djuna Barnes
