Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of female experience.

And I seemed to discern a power and meaning in the old, which the more impassioned would not allow.

In some causes silence is dangerous.

I am interested in the gaps between one piece of sidewalk and the next. I am interested in the things for which we don't always have a name, and the things that are not easy to articulate - the difference between what we think and how we feel.

I have always wanted to know what's going on under the surface.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

My mother always said, 'The best way to ruin a story is to tell the other side.'

And now there is merely silence, silence, silence, saying all we did not know.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

I've always believed that if you are precise in your thoughts, it's not the lines you say that are important - it's what exists between the lines. What I'm compelled by most is that transparency of thought, what is left unspoken.

However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.

I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.

Everything in life is speaking in spite of it's apparent silence.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.

Everyone's story is different, and we can't really be inside them.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

The most profound things are inexpressible.

The real secrets are not the ones I tell.

Saying nothing... sometimes says the most.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.