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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
Wish
Look
Looks
Frighten
Must
Tender
Much
Conformity
Inward
Inside
Stand

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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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.
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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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I have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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Only the impossible lasts forever.
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.
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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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.
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
Djuna Barnes
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God, children know something they can't tell they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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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Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
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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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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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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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
Djuna Barnes
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Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
Djuna Barnes