Quote

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.

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
Color
Ladder
Goes
Ladders
Wants
Texture
Become
Boston
Doe
Soil
Bowery
Mind
Touch
Cognizant
Universal
Shovel
Gets
Shovels

More quotes by Djuna Barnes

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I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
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Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
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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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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.
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Love is the first lie wisdom the last.
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The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
Djuna Barnes
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I've seen death and I didn't like it.
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We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
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Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward.
Djuna Barnes
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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 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.
Djuna Barnes
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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.
Djuna Barnes