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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

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
Mortality
Muscles
Skin
Skins
Wind
Clenched

More quotes by 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
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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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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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I've seen death and I didn't like it.
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Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
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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.
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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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.
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To think is to be sick.
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I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
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Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
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An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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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.
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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.
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I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
Djuna Barnes