Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

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

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

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?

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

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

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

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

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.

Lovers should also have their days off.

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

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.

Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.

Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.

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

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.

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

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

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.

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.

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

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

Anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

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

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

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

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

Might I be the one I am looking for?

Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

To be married is to be neither alone nor together.

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

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

Novels are longer than life.

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

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

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.

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

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.