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The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.

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
Torment
Pulled
Skin
Skins
Head
Night
May

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

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The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.
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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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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An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
Djuna Barnes
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Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
Djuna Barnes
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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.
Djuna Barnes
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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.
Djuna Barnes
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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
Djuna Barnes
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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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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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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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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Only the impossible lasts forever.
Djuna Barnes
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I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
Djuna Barnes
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To think is to be sick.
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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For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
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