88 Quotes by Natalie Clifford Barney

A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.

In love there is no status quo.

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?

To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.

Silence too can be indiscreet.

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.

My only books were women's looks.