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
Best
Lived
Parlor
Without
Beginning
Dressings
Life
Taste
Salad
Doors
Dressing
Gets
Tastes
Wonder
Hasn
Whether
Servant
Girl
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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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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Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
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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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Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
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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.
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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
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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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Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
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Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
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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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After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
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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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The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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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.
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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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An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
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To think is to be sick.
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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.
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