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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
Last
Firsts
First
Love
Wisdom
Lying
Lasts

More quotes by 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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No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into.
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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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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No man needs curing of his individual sickness his universal malady is what he should look to.
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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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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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Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
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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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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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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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.
Djuna Barnes
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To think is to be sick.
Djuna Barnes
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I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
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.
Djuna Barnes
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
Djuna Barnes
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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
Djuna Barnes
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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.
Djuna Barnes
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Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
Djuna Barnes