Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
Natalie Clifford Barney
It’s necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Lovers should also have their days off.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Novels are longer than life.
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.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Fatalism is the lazy man’s way of accepting the inevitable.
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.
Natalie Clifford Barney
My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?
Natalie Clifford Barney
It is time for dead languages to be quiet.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
Natalie Clifford Barney
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.
Natalie Clifford Barney
To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.
Natalie Clifford Barney
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.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
Natalie Clifford Barney
How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.
Natalie Clifford Barney
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
Natalie Clifford Barney
If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
Natalie Clifford Barney
