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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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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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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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After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
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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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One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
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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.
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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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Love is the first lie wisdom the last.
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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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Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
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I've seen death and I didn't like it.
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Only the impossible lasts forever.
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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.
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Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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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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I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
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