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Natalie Clifford Barney
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“Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.”
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“... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.”
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“... doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.”
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“Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.”
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“Generous with ideas that he had not yet written, apparently as much a dilettante as I, our conversations became our works, outlines on the tablets of bright midnights. ”
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“Hero worship has died with heroes, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something.”
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“Tea — that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen ... ”
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“A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.”
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“Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.”
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“The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.”
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“Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”
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“Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?”
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“It is time for dead languages to be quiet.”
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“Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.”
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“... 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.”
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“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?”
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“Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either.”
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“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.”
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“Our shadows are taller than ourselves.”
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“If only art were as rare as good taste ... ”
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“Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit.”
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“Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.”
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“My only books were women's looks.”
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“... if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.”
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“You are so much more beautiful than the things that will befall you.”
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“To be married is to be neither alone nor together.”
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“I judge people's charm by the ease with which I express myself in their presence.”
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“Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.”
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“One is not oneself every day—fortunately.”
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“Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.”
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“Might I be the one I am looking for?”
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“She introduced me to pleasure—and I have never forgiven her.”
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“Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!”
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“Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.”
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“In love there is no status quo.”
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“Eternity: what a waste of time. ”
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“It's not surprising the faithful remain adoring; they never see him.”
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“He accumulated a wide vocabulary and waited all his life for an idea.”
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“A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.”
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“A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.”
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“What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.”
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“I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.”
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“I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.”
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“Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.”
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“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.”
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“All expression, all art, is an indiscretion we commit against ourselves. This is not an 'impoverishment' but an increase in wealth, for it is in this way that we make the short hours of our lives live on beyond themselves.”
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“Silence too can be indiscreet.”
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“That parasite: the past.”
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“To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.”
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“If only 'right-thinking' people could be replaced by thinking people. ”
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“If they were only free thinkers, but they are free speakers!”
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“The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.”
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“I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it. ”
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“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?”
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“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.”
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“The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.”
Natalie Clifford Barney, U.S.-born French writer, poet, memoirist
(1876 - 1972)