Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) was an American-born expatriate poet, playwright, translator, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and epigrammatist. A forebearer of feminist literature, she developed an international literary salon in Paris and an Academy of Women to promote women writers.
Born in Bar Harbor, Maine, Barney inherited a vast fortune from her parents and, drawn by the creative ambiance and climate of moral freedom, emigrated to Paris in 1902. She stayed there until death, setting up and presiding over a salon that became one of the most respectable and influential of the day, frequented by poet Ezra Pound and other notable artistic and literary figures. The French writer Remy de Gourmont fell in love with Barney and produced two volumes concerning their platonic relationship: Lettres à l’Amazone (1914) and Lettres intimes à l’Amazone (1927.)
Barney is better known for her active and outspoken lesbianism than her literary work, which is consistently inaccessible. Her irregular publications, primarily written in French, were printed by small publishing houses in limited editions, now out of print. She is now receiving more awareness from feminist critics in light of her continual artistic effort with the question of the female experience.
Barney’s own writing consists of eight slight volumes that include Quelques Portraits: Sonnets de Femmes (1900,) Pensées d’une amazone (1920; “Thoughts of an Amazon,”) and Souvenirs indiscrets (1960.) Her only English work is The One Who is Legion, or A.D.’s After-Life (1930,) a crack at exploring the western concept of the feminine.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Natalie Clifford Barney
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Virtue
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
Topics: God
Lovers should also have their days off.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Lovers, Love
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Love
To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Independence
How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Rest, Leisure
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists, when you can ignore them like wise men?
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Riches, Property, Possessions
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
Topics: Love
Eternity—waste of time.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Time, Eternity
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
Topics: Reality
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Heroism
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Business
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Crying, Face, Faces
Novels are longer than life.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Youth
Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Intentions, Purpose
Fatalism is the lazy man’s way of accepting the inevitable.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Despair
If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Impartiality
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