Colette
49 quotes
Biography
"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."
"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."(Casual Chance, 1964)"
"Hope costs nothing."
"No one asked you to be happy. Get to work."
"When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes."
"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."
"Nothing ages a woman like living in the country."
"Life as a child and then as a girl had taught her patience, hope, silence; and given her a prisoner's proficiency in handling these virtues as weapons."
"Let’s go out and buy playing-cards, good wine, bridge-scorers, knitting needles—all the paraphernalia to fill a gaping void, all that’s required to disguise that monster, an old woman."
"It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place."
"Le monde des èmotions qu’on nomme, á la lègére, physiques."
"If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love—well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction."
"Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shrivelled innocence of an old maid?"
"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."
"You do not notice changes in what is always before you."
"But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious."
"The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time."
"To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one."
"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."
"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."
"Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness."
"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."
"What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!"
"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."
"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."