Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes
-
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
-
No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.
-
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.
-
Hope costs nothing.
-
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.
-
The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.
-
I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
-
The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.
-
It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
-
Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.
-
A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men...
-
A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.
-
When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
-
You do not notice changes in what is always before you.
-
Time spent with a cat is never wasted.
-
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.
-
That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!
-
There are no ordinary cats.
-
- 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!
-
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.
-
Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems.
-
We only do well the things we like doing.
-
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.
-
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.