Colette: Timing

Colette was 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi. Explore interesting quotes on timing.
Colette: 118   quotes 48   likes

“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…”

Colette

Barks and Purrs
Context: Toby-Dog: It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling.
Kiki-The-Demure: A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand.
Toby-Dog: That's wrong. It's indiscreet.
Kiki-The-Demure: Not at all. I have a right to everything.
Toby-Dog: To everything? And I?
Kiki-The-Demure: I don't imagine you lack anything, do you?
Toby-Dog: Ah, I don't know. 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...
Kiki-The-Demure: And then what dreadful thing happens?
Toby-Dog: You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it — Castor Oil!

Love , World , Sadness , Dogs

“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.”

Colette

Source: Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels

Travel , Cats , Solitude , Time

“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.”

Colette

Journey for Myself (1971) “Beauties,” Quatre Saisons (c. 1928).

Nature , Time

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

Colette

Le Pur et l'Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)

Light , 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.”

Colette

Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

Way , Time

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

Colette

Paris From My Window (1944)

Travel , Time

“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.”

Colette

"The Captain", Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

Death , Change , Time