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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
Love
Wisdom
Lying
Lasts
Last
Firsts
First

More quotes by 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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One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.
Djuna Barnes
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Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
Djuna Barnes
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I've seen death and I didn't like it.
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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Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
Djuna Barnes
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Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
Djuna Barnes
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To think is to be sick.
Djuna Barnes
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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
Djuna Barnes
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God, children know something they can't tell they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
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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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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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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Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
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 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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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
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