Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.

Some critics interpret her as saying that the aggression that leads to war is visible in all male relationships. "My queerness" Natalie Clifford Barney said "is not a vice is not deliberate and harms no one. In her writings Natalie Clifford Barney supported feminism and pacifism.

She opposed monogamy and had many overlapping long and short-term relationships including on-and-off romances with poet Renée Vivien and dancer Armen Ohanian and a 50-year relationship with painter Romaine Brooks. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels ranging from the salacious French bestseller Sapphic Idyll to The Well of Loneliness arguably the most famous lesbian novel of the 20th century.