Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

The man who wishes to bend me with his tale of woe must shed true tears - not tears that have been got ready overnight.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.

In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

I can't fake emotion.

I'm acting from my heart. The way how I feel is the way how I act.

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

It's hard for me to fake smile. I personally think I look stupid fake smiling.

If I have got a feeling or emotion, I just express it as it comes. I am not good at filtering!

Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

The feelings I don't have I don't have. The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have. The felings you say you have, you don't have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course, but the thing is, I meant it when I said it. I'm crazy. I swear to God I am.

I'm supposed to make people cry, but not by manipulating.

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.

I try to be genuine. I try to be real. It's such a subjective thing, but I try to convey an emotion.

Flattery won't hurt you if you don't swallow it.

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

With a lot of what we take to be true feelings, especially on pop records, we feel them because they're cleverly crafted. And because the words are written by somebody who knows how to craft words and draw on those things and convey those feelings. That doesn't mean they're dishonest. But it also doesn't mean that it's all just pure primitive emotion spilling out.

You cannot be in love with love.

Ready tears are a sign of treachery, not of grief

I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

Now smile a real smile for me so I know you're not suffering inside.