Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes & Sayings

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#2. Anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#3. Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!

Natalie Clifford Barney

#4. Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#6. Novels are longer than life.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#7. 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.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#8. How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#9. A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#10. If I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#11. 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.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#12. 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.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#14. To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#17. Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#18. Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#19. Silence too can be indiscreet.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#20. Doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#21. Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#23. Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#25. In love there is no status quo.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#27. We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#28. That parasite: the past.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#30. Paris has always seemed ... the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#32. 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?

Natalie Clifford Barney

#33. What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#36. The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#37. 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.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#38. One is not oneself every day-fortunately.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#41. Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#43. When she lowers her eyes she seems to hold all the beauty in the world between her eyelids; when she raises them I see only myself in her gaze.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#44. Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney

#46. Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#47. 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.

Natalie Clifford Barney