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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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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
Looks
Frighten
Must
Tender
Much
Conformity
Inward
Inside
Stand
Wish
Look

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

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Una's face was an unbroken block of calculation, saving where, upon her upper lip, a little down of hair fluttered. Yet it gave one an uncanny feeling. It made one think of a tassel on a hammer.
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 priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
Djuna Barnes
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
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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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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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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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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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For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
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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One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
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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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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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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Love is the first lie wisdom the last.
Djuna Barnes
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I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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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Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
Djuna Barnes
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I've seen death and I didn't like it.
Djuna Barnes