Colette Quotes

•"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."
- Colette

•"Be happy. It's one way of being wise."
- Colette

•"Give me a dozen such heartbreaks, if that would help me lose a couple of pounds."
- Colette

•"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."
- Colette

•"I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering."
- Colette

•"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."
- Colette

•"If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles."
- Colette

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

•"It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place."
- Colette

•"It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship."
- Colette

•"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

•"January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead."
- Colette

•"Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you."
- Colette

•"My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved."
- Colette

•"Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger."
- Colette

•"No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object."
- Colette

•"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."
- Colette

•"One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave."
- Colette

•"Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet."
- Colette

•"Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either."
- Colette

•"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."
- Colette

•"Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette."
- Colette

•"The cat is the animal to whom the Creator gave the biggest eye, the softest fur, the most supremely delicate nostrils, a mobile ear, an unrivaled paw and a curved claw borrowed from the rose-tree."
- Colette

•"The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives."
- Colette

•"The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike."
- Colette

•"The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot 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

•"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

•"To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one."
- Colette

•"Total absence of humor renders life impossible."
- Colette

•"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."
- 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

•"What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner."
- Colette

•"Writing only leads to more writing."
- Colette

•"You do not notice changes in what is always before you."
- 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

•"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."
- Colette