Quote

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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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
Without
Beginning
Dressings
Life
Taste
Salad
Doors
Dressing
Gets
Tastes
Wonder
Hasn
Whether
Servant
Girl
Door
Best
Lived
Parlor

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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.
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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?
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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
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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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Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
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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.
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One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
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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?
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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
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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.
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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
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The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
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Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
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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.
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I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
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A man's sorrow runs uphill true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.
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