Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.

Silence too can be indiscreet.

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

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.

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Might I be the one I am looking for?

... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

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

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

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.