Colette Quotes

“I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.”

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which… I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”

“The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.”

“Time spent with a cat is never wasted.”

“Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come…”

“Then, bidding farewell to The Knick-Knack, I went to collect the few personal belongings which, at that time, I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”

“It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.”

“The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.”

“The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.”

“Music is love in search of a word.”

“I want nothing from love, in short, but love.”

“Kiki-The-Demure: Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic.
Toby-Dog: I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath.”

“No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.”

“Be happy.
It's one way of being wise.”

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”

“On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath.”

“Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shrivelled innocence of an old maid?”

“Boredom helps one to make decisions.”

“Her childhood, then her adolescence, had taught her patience, hope, silence and the easy manipulation of the weapons and virtues of all prisoners.”

“Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.”

“For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.”

“It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.”

“We only do well the things we like doing.”

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

(, 1964)”

“There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”

“In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.”

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

“Total absence of humor renders life impossible.”

“So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.”

“What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!”

“When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.”

“If he's getting married, he's not longer interesting.”

“I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.”

“To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.”

“I have found my voice again and the art of using it…”

“To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.”

“If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles”

“You do not notice changes in what is always before you.”

“But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.”

“There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.”

“Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.”

“A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men… nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us — oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings.”

“By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.”

“Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: “It’s four o’clock … At five I have my abyss.””

“It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.”

“Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.”

“As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.”

“Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken.”

“Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.”

“It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.”

“The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.”

“In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.”

“Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.”