Natalie Clifford Barney
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.Collection: Love
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.
Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
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.
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.
If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
Novels are longer than life.
It is time for dead languages to be quiet.
Lovers should also have their days off.
Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.Collection: Normal
It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.Collection: Quiet
Silence too can be indiscreet.Collection: Silence
My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.Collection: Vices
I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.Collection: Humans
Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.Collection: Believer
The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.Collection: Creativity
Might I be the one I am looking for?Collection: Might
Our shadows are taller than ourselves.Collection: Shadow
The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.Collection: Past
... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.Collection: Rooftops
I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it.Collection: Believe
Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either.Collection: Wife
if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.Collection: Ambition
I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.Collection: Looks
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?Collection: Pain
Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.Collection: Sensuality
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.Collection: Real
Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.Collection: Revenge
Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.Collection: Believe
Tea - that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen.Collection: Tea
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.Collection: Inspiration
Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.Collection: Prejudice
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Abuse
Eternity - waste of time.Collection: Time
Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit.Collection: Cities
To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.Collection: Book
A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.Collection: Book
One is not oneself every day-fortunately.Collection: Personality
If only art were as rare as good taste.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Reality
It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.Collection: Suffering