Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes
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If he's getting married, he's not longer interesting.
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A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
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No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.
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Beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water.
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A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.
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Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut animals up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph. . . . Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?
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The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.
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The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.
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A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men...
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It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
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Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.
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I have found my voice again and the art of using it.
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But what is the heart, madame? It's worth less than people think. it's quite accommodating, it accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it's not very particular. But the body... Ha! That's something else again! It has a cultivated taste, as they say, it knows what it wants. A heart doesn't choose, and one always ends up by loving.
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It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
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I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.
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Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.
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To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.
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The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.
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Sit down and 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.
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One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.
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I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
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I've entered the world of wine without any professional training, but a definite appetite for good bottles.
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Be happy. It's one way of being wise.
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At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak.