Top 80 Colette Quotes
#1. Love ... is also a form of poison, for to fall in love is to want and to need everything necessary for survival from one all-powerful and barely differentiated Other.
Colette
#2. 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.
Colette
#3. It is only in pain that a woman is capable of rising above mediocrity. Her resistance to pain is infinite; one can use and abuse it without any fear that she will die, as long as some childish physical cowardice or some religious hope keeps her from the suicide that offers her a way out.
Colette
#4. I went to collect the few personal belongings which ... I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
Colette
#5. Time spent with a cat is never wasted.
Colette
#6. You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
Colette
#7. You were listening at the door, Gigi!"
"No, Grandmamma."
"Yes, you had your ear to the keyhole. You must never listen at key-holes. You don't hear properly and so you get things all wrong.
Colette
#8. 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.
Colette
#9. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
Colette
#10. Writing only leads to more writing.
Colette
#11. After you, probably anyone can have me who wants me. A woman, many women. But never another cat.
Colette
#12. The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench and 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.
Colette
#13. And since, through lack of vocation or from habit, [Julie] was prone to confuse pity with boredom, she felt herself practically a prisoner ...
Colette
#14. People who are perfectly sane and happy don't make good literature, alas.
Colette
#15. The seventeenth, Desmond! Come along at once; everything's all right. We're going to buy a huge bracelet for my wife, an enormous cigarette-holder for Madame Peloux, and a tiny tie-pin for you
Colette
#16. Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
Colette
#17. What an ennobling sadness you lent to my evening's enjoyment.
Colette
#18. If he's getting married, he's not longer interesting.
Colette
#19. I want nothing from love, in short, but love.
Colette
#20. 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
#21. My son, be rich and live your own life! Tell yourself that you're the incarnation of an ancient aristocracy. Model yourself on the feudal barons. You're a warrior
Colette
#22. I liked being with him, as I like being with swift animals who are motionless when at rest.
Colette
#23. There are no ordinary cats.
Colette
#24. We only do well the things we like doing.
Colette
#25. I have nothing to say to men and never had. Judging from the little time I've spent with them, their usual conversation is sickening. Besides, they bore me. I believe," he hesitated, then concluded, "I believe I don't understand men.
Colette
#26. I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.
Colette
#27. That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!
Colette
#28. In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.
Colette
#29. One can't write of love while making love.
Colette
#30. - 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!
Colette
#31. They exchanged looks full of mischievous security.
Colette
#33. Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight. For it is the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it.
Colette
#34. She (her mother) noticed that I was prettier than I was at home. Thus do girls change color in the warmth of masculine desire, whether they are fifteen or thirty.
Colette
#35. Don't you think, that there are very few men who know, without raising their voice or changing their tone, to say ... what has to be said?
Colette
#36. Two o'clock already! High time for a woman of letters who has turned out badly to go to sleep.
Colette
#37. I was changing. Slowly, if you like, but what matter? To change is the great thing.
Colette
#38. Beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water
Colette
#39. The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.
Colette
#40. When she raises her eyelids, it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
Colette
#41. Do I have a separate room? Don't I make love to you well?"
She hesitated, smiling with exquisite suspicion. "Do you call that love, Fred?"
"There are other words for it, but you wouldn't appreciate them.
Colette
#42. I heard on their lips the language of passion, of betrayal and jealousy, and sometimes despair - languages with which I was all too familiar.
Colette
#43. By associating with the cat, one only risks becoming richer.
Colette
#44. Do not think, as you read this, that I am painting my own portrait. Be patient, it is only my model.
Colette
#45. Be happy.
It's one way of being wise.
Colette
#46. A good book is a portal that will take you anywhere in the world.
Colette
#47. I have found my voice again and the art of using it ...
Colette
#48. There is no doubt that, if ever my heart were to call my master Chance by another name, I should make an excellent Catholic.
Colette
#49. Mothers sound so stupid when they praise their daughters to the skies.
Colette
#50. If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.
Colette
#51. 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.
Colette
#52. At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak.
Colette
#53. It is the image in the mind that links us to our lost treasures; but it is the loss that shapes the image, gathers the flowers, weaves the garland.
Colette
#54. To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
Colette
#55. Her nature is like a demonstrative cat's; she is delicate, acutely sensitive to cold, and incredibly caressing in her ways.
Colette
#56. There are days when solitude 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.
Colette
#57. Everything that astonished me when I was young astonishes me even more today. The time will never come for me when there are no more discoveries to make. Every morning the world is as new again and I will not cease to flower except through death.
Colette
#58. Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems.
Colette
#59. 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.
Colette
#60. Youth is not the age to seduce, it's the age to be seduced.
Colette
#61. Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
Colette
#62. All this is still my kingdom, a small portion of the splendid riches which God distributes to passers-by, to wanderers and to solitaries. The earth belongs to anyone who stops for a moment, gazes and goes on his way; the whole sun belongs to the naked lizard who basks in it.
Colette
#63. 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)
Colette
#64. I have lived ten years of wild rovings, of conquests and discoveries, in those woods; the day when I have to leave them my heart will be very heavy.
Colette
#65. No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.
Colette
#66. We all go through that. Everyone's feeling a little out of sorts. No one knows exactly where he stands. Work is a wonderful way of putting you on your feet again, old boy
Colette
#67. I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.
Colette
#68. Love is not an honorable sentiment
Colette
#69. The seventeenth of March. In other words, spring. Desmond, people who think themselves smart, I mean those in the height of fashion, women or men - can they afford to wait any longer before buying their spring wardrobes?
Colette
#70. Curious how people can go on doing the same thing day after day!
Colette
#71. 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
#72. 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.
Colette
#73. You don't think before you do something foolish. You do your thinking afterwards.
Colette
#74. Incompatibility became established between them like a new season of the year.
Colette
#75. Music is love in search of a word.
Colette
#76. Don't ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman's reputation
Colette
#77. My true friends always gave me this supreme proof of attachment: a spontaneous aversion to the men I loved.
Colette
#78. Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you ...
Colette
#79. I have no equals, I have only my fellow wayfarers.
Colette
#80. What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
Colette
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