Welcome to our collection of quotes by Natalie Clifford Barney
Wikipedia Summary for Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney (October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972) was an American playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate in Paris.
Barney's salon was held at her home at 20 rue Jacob in Paris's Left Bank for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation. She worked to promote writing by women and formed a "Women's Academy" (L'Académie des Femmes) in response to the all-male French Academy while also giving support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont to Truman Capote.
She was openly lesbian and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900, considering scandal as "the best way of getting rid of nuisances" (meaning heterosexual attention from young men). She wrote in both French and English. In her writings she supported feminism and pacifism. She opposed monogamy and had many overlapping long and short-term relationships, including on-and-off romances with poet Renée Vivien and dancer Armen Ohanian and a 50-year relationship with painter Romaine Brooks. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels written by others, ranging from the salacious French bestseller Idylle Saphique to The Well of Loneliness, the most famous lesbian novel of the twentieth century.
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists, when you can ignore them like wise men?
Paris has always seemed ... the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.
Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.
Eternity -- waste of time.
Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!
That parasite: the past.
A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.
Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.
Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.
Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.
Doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.
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.
To be married is to be neither alone nor together.
I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.
Hero worship has died with heroes, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something.
Anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.
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?
Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.
I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.
My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.
A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.
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.
Tea -- that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen.
Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
Lovers should also have their days off.
It is time for dead languages to be quiet.
Novels are longer than life.
Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
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.
How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.
To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
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.
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?