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Love is the first lie wisdom the last.

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
Lying
Lasts
Last
Firsts
First
Love
Wisdom

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

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New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
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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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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One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
Djuna Barnes
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
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No man needs curing of his individual sickness his universal malady is what he should look to.
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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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.
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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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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Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
Djuna Barnes
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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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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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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The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
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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Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
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