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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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
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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 have been loved,' she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
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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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I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
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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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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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To love without criticism is to be betrayed.
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Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
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And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
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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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The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
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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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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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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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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
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Only the impossible lasts forever.
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