Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes
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Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?
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Silence too can be indiscreet.
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... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.
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Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
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I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.
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It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.
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Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.
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The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.
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Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
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Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
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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.
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Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.
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My only books were women's looks.
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Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.
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Lovers should also have their days off.
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Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit.
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Eternity: what a waste of time.
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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.
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Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.
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Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.
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The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.
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In love there is no status quo.
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It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.
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if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.
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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.
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To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks.
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A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.
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Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
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Might I be the one I am looking for?
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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.
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Natalie Clifford Barney
- Born: October 31, 1876
- Died: February 2, 1972
- Occupation: Playwright
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