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

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The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all.
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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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Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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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 talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
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No man needs curing of his individual sickness his universal malady is what he should look to.
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New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
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Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
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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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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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When one wants to become cognizant of the color and the texture of the soil, one does not get a ladder one gets a shovel. When one wants to get into touch with the texture of the universal mind, one does not go to Boston one goes to the Bowery.
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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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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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For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
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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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Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
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One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
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