Natalie Clifford Barney

“I love my life, but I don't live it.”

“I have more talent in my smallest toe than you have in your entire body.”

“Paris has always been my real wife.”

“Fidelity is a matter of taste, not of morals.”

“Writing is the only way to talk without being interrupted.”

“I never had a lover who wasn't my friend.”

“She is a storm in a teacup.”

“My only books were women's looks.”

“The only real death is the death of desire.”

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.”

“Being a legend is easy. Living up to it is the hard part.”

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.”

“My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.”

“Marriage, this terrible process of being one, of two, of becoming one.”

“Solitude—that worn-out word, yet a reality.”

“Our lives are our mythologies. We are the gods of our own universes.”

“For what is there more honourable than a silent love?”

“When you're in love, you're capable of learning everything and knowing things you had no idea you knew.”

“The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.”

“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”