Sidonie Gabrielle Quotes

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#2. It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#5. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#9. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#10. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#12. Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#13. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#14. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#17. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#19. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#21. 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 ...

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#22. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#24. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#25. A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#27. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#32. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.

Truman Capote

#33. Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#35. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#36. 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.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette