Colette quotes - page 2

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet. (Colette)

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

Colette

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.

Colette

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.

Colette

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.

Colette

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.”.

Colette

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.

Colette

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

Colette

Hope costs nothing.

Colette

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.

Colette

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts. (Colette)

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men... nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us - oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings.

Colette

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

Colette

There are no ordinary cats.

Colette

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

Colette

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

Colette

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.

Colette

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

Colette

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.

Colette

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.

Colette

Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken. (Colette)

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

Colette

Don't ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman's reputation.

Colette

Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.

Colette

For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.

Colette

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Colette

Colette - Image

Occupation: French Novelist
Born: January 28, 1873
Died: August 3, 1954
Quotes count: 75
Wikipedia: Colette

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