Colette Quotes

There is no doubt that, if ever my heart were to call my master Chance by another name, I should make an excellent Catholic.

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

Her nature is like a demonstrative cat's; she is delicate, acutely sensitive to cold, and incredibly caressing in her ways.

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.

I felt my soul overwhelmed with sorrow because, though I'm not in the least fond of dancing, I should have liked to dance with someone whom I adored with all my heart: I should have liked to have that someone there so that I could relieve my tension by telling him everything that I confided only to Fanchette or to my pillow (and not even to my diary) because I so wildly needed that someone, and this humiliated me, and I would never surrender myself except to the someone whom I should completely love and completely know - dreams, in short, that would never be realized!

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

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

Held captive beneath the translucent skin, the seven colours of the rainbow flickered with some secret fire of their own all over the surface of each precious sphere. Chéri recognized the pearl with a dimple, the slightly egg-shaped pearl, and the biggest pearl of the string, distinguishable by its unique pink. 'These pearls, these at least, are unchanged! They and I remain unchanged.

I put on a martyred expression - like this - as if I was bored to death with every luxury under the sun. I had the time of my life.

Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems.

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.

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.

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.

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

She's a very mysterious creature, with an open smile and a closed soul.

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

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?

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

Her eyes are beautiful, eloquent, and frightened, and seem to be telling the man: "You're a clumsy lover . . . You don't begin to understand me . . . I don't really know you, and you scare me . . . You sneer at everything I like . . . You lie so well! . . . You possess me completely, yet I can't trust you . . . If you knew what limpid springs you wall up within me because I fear you! 'What am I doing here at your side? Would that this music could free me of you forever! Or else that this violin would stop before I find out any more about you! You yearn for my undoing, not my happiness, and what is worst in me assures you of your victory.

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.

Those two are trying to hide,' Chéri thought. 'They're deceiving someone somewhere. The whole world's busy deceiving and being deceived. But I . . .' He did not finish the sentence, but a repugnance made him jump to his feet, an action that meant, 'But I am chaste.' A faint ray of light, flickering uncertainly over stagnant, hitherto unfeeling regions of his inmost being, was enough to suggest that chastity and loneliness are one and the same misfortune.

By associating with the cat, one only risks becoming richer.

People who are perfectly sane and happy don't make good literature, alas.

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

I have no equals, I have only my fellow wayfarers.

- 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!

They exchanged looks full of mischievous security.

It can't drag on this way much longer," she said to herself. "One evening he'll whistle under my window, I'll go down by a ladder or a knotted rope and he will carry me away on a motorcycle, off to a den where his subjects will be assembled. He'll say: 'Here is your new Queen.' And ... and ... it will be terrible!"
viii. Their Queen is away and anarchy reigns! The Journal said so! How grand to be Queen, with a red ribbon and a revolver ...

Does she deliberately make herself ugly out of modesty or pride?" Brice wondered, watching his wife walk pigeon-toed, run into the corner of the table, and rub her thigh. "It's a kind of lie, too.

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

Hope costs nothing.

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

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

Do not think, as you read this, that I am painting my own portrait. Be patient, it is only my model.

They looked at each other in open hostility - she, leaning on her elbow in a flurry of frills and lace; he, sitting side-saddle on the edge of the bed. He was thinking 'Who's she to talk of any wrinkles I may have one day?' and she 'Why is he so ugly when he laughs? - he who's the very picture of beauty!' She thought for a moment, then finished aloud: "It's because you look so ill-natured when you're joking. You never laugh except unkindly - ᴀᴛ people, and that makes you ugly. You're often ugly.

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

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.

Oh! To rationalize oneself into matrimony ... Oh! To decide something so grave in life 'after mature consideration'! Choose the color of a dress after a thousand hesitations, but for God's sake, get married without reflecting on it! That's the grace I wish I wish for you. May you even be so distracted that day that you walk past the registry office without remembering to stop there.

Youth is not the age to seduce, it's the age to be seduced.

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.

The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mothers sound so stupid when they praise their daughters to the skies.

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.

Music is love in search of a word.

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

I liked being with him, as I like being with swift animals who are motionless when at rest.

Love is not an honorable sentiment

A woman claims as many native lands as she had happy love affairs, Likewise, she is born under every sky where she recovers from the pain of loving.

My true friends always gave me this supreme proof of attachment: a spontaneous aversion to the men I loved.

To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

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)

We only do well the things we like doing.

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.

Her stormy eyes, her sincere sensuality, the softness of her skin and her voice,

I heard on their lips the language of passion, of betrayal and jealousy, and sometimes despair - languages with which I was all too familiar.

It wasn't only a little she-cat I bought. It was the nobility of all cats, their infinite disinterestedness, their knowledge of how to live, their affinities with the highest type of humans.

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

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

And since, through lack of vocation or from habit, [Julie] was prone to confuse pity with boredom, she felt herself practically a prisoner ...

One can't write of love while making love.

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.

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