Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.

... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.

Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.

Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.

I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.

I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.

Lovers should also have their days off.

albinos aren't reproached for having pink eyes and whitish hair, why should they hold it again me for being a lesbian? It's a question of nature: my queerness isn't a vice, isn't 'deliberate,' and harms no one.

Perhaps a reign of powerful women is necessary to make, or unmake when need be, powerful men. Women would not waste so readily and uselessly the lives they had such care and pain in bearing. Why should they submit to the massacre of the innocent, one generation after another ... and allow them to be brought up as live-stock for the inevitable killing?

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

Tea - that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen.

To mis-quote is the very foundation of original style. The success of most writers is almost entirely due to continuous and courageous abuse of familiar misquotation.

Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either.

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.

With renunciation life begins.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.

Eternity - waste of time.

Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit.

We are nearly all composed of such a complex mixture of human qualities that in each one of us reside both masculine and feminine principles: what man is without any female attribute and what woman never demonstrates any masculine characteristics?

There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.

I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.

A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.

My only books were women's looks.

In love there is no status quo.

To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks.

Hero worship has died with heroes, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something.

I judge people's charm by the ease with which I express myself in their presence.

That parasite: the past.

If only art were as rare as good taste.

All expression, all art, is an indiscretion we commit against ourselves. This is not an 'impoverishment' but an increase in wealth, for it is in this way that we make the short hours of our lives live on beyond themselves.

Novels are longer than life.

Eternity: what a waste of time.

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.