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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

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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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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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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.
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For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
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The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.
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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?
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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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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.
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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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Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
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I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
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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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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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God, children know something they can't tell they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
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I couldn't ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap it wouldn't even fill up the hole that the mice came through.
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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
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I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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