Sidonie gabrielle colette quotes

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts.

We only do well the things we like doing.

No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.

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.

I want nothing from love, in short, but love.

I've entered the world of wine without any professional training, but a definite appetite for good bottles.

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?

In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.

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.

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

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.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

Hope costs nothing.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

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?

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

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.

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

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.

I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

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.

I have found my voice again and the art of using it.

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.

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

Writing only leads to more writing.

At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

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.

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.

What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

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.

That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!

There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.

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.

If he's getting married, he's not longer interesting.

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

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.

January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.

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.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

- 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!

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.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men...

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

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.

You don't think before you do something foolish. You do your thinking afterwards.

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

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.

Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems.

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.

There are no ordinary cats.

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

At sixty-three years of age, less a quarter, one still has plans.

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.

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.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

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.

If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.

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.

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.

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.

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.

A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude.