Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney (31 October 1876 2 February 1972) was an American expatriate who lived, wrote, and ran a famous salon at 20 Rue Jacob in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. She was a poet, memoirist and epigrammatist, but believed her life was her true work of art. Barney was publicly lesbian, and worked to revive a literary history for women. She was especially interested in the poems of Sappho and tried to recreate a school of women poets like the one that Sappho had on Mytilene. Barney was also infamous for her many conquests in love, including poet Renee Vivien, dancer Liane de Pougy and painter Romaine Brooks.
16 Quotes
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Eternity -- waste of time.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Novels are longer than life.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
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.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
— 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
Lovers should also have their days off.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?
— 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
Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
— Natalie Clifford Barney
Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
— Natalie Clifford Barney