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

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One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.
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Only the impossible lasts forever.
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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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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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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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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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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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Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
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To think is to be sick.
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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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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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God, children know something they can't tell they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!
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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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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
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I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
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I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
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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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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
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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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