Colette Quotes

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

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

~ Colette

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

~ Colette

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

~ 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

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

~ 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

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

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

~ Colette

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

~ Colette

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

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

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

It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer.'So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and he must tactfully let themselves and each other die?''Let them die,' he repeated.I had accompanied him as far as the revolving glass door of the lobby.'Let them die,' he said again. 'It's less dangerous. I can swear on my word of honor that I never gave a present or made a loan or an exchange of anything except . . . this . . .'He waved both hands in a complicated gesture which fleetingly indicated his chest, his mouth, his genitals, his thighs. Thanks no doubt to my fatigue, I was reminded of an animal standing on its hind legs and unwinding the invisible. Then he resumed his strictly human significance, opened the door, and easily mingled with the night outside, where the sea was already a little paler than the sky.

~ Colette

The more sensitive the lunatic, the less able is he to resist this prying interest of the normal human being. I felt that Renée's change of key - to myself, I compared Renée to a sweet melody, a little flat despite its laborious harmonies - was approaching.

~ Colette