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

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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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An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
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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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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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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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Love is the first lie wisdom the last.
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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
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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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Life is painful, nasty and short.. in my case it has only been painful and nasty.
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Youth is cause, effect is age so with the thickening of the neck we get data.
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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 unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
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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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I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
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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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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
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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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