Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes
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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 have found my voice again and the art of using it.
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You do not notice changes in what is always before you.
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Be happy. It's one way of being wise.
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There are no ordinary cats.
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In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
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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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I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
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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.
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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.
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Hope costs nothing.
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The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.
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It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts.
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No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.
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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.
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Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like some plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal. No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl.
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When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
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I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.
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What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
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I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.
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I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.
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Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems.
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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.
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- and how time flies! What, has it already been twenty years, already forty years that we are together? Why, how terrible! We haven't yet said all we wanted to say to each other... May we have a little respite, or else may we be allowed to begin all over again!