"The truth is how you say it, and to be 'one's self' is the most shocking custom of all."
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Quote collection
Djuna Barnes quotes (page 3 of 4)
75 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!"
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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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"There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole."
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"Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data."
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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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"I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it."
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"None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last."
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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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"Life, the permission to know death."
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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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"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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"You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher."
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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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"I couldn't ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap; it wouldn't even fill up the hole that the mice came through."
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"Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out."
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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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"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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"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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