Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes
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Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.
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Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.
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Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
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On the first of May, with my comrades of the catechism class, I laid lilac, chamomile and rose before the altar of the Virgin, and returned full of pride to show my blessed posy. My mother laughed her irreverent laugh and, looking at my bunch of flowers, which was bringing the may-bug into the sitting-room right under the lamp, she said: Do you suppose it wasn't already blessed before?
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I want nothing from love, in short, but love.
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If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.
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You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
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My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
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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.
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In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.
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Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
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Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. 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.
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By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.
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Is suffering so very serious? ...I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful... hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain... is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.
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Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
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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.
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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.
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January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.
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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.
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Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.
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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.
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If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.
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There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.
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A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude.