Colette Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

How pure are those who have never forced anything open!

Colette
A bed, a nice fresh bed, with smoothly drawn sheets and a hot-water bottle at the end of it, soft to the feet like a live animal's tummy.

Colette
There is a certain melancholy in having to tell oneself that one has said good-bye — unless of course one is a grandmother — to the age and the circumstances that enable one to observe young children closely and passionately.

Colette
Breathe in the pine and mint from the little salt marsh; its fragrance is scratching at the gate like a cat!

Colette
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

Colette
When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

Colette
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
One always writes for someone. Rarely for several people. Never for everyone.

Colette
Her childhood, then her adolescence, had taught her patience, hope, silence and the easy manipulation of the weapons and virtues of all prisoners.

Colette
It is man who has affixed the word 'wild' to the name animal.

Colette
My virtue's still far too small, I don't trot it out and about yet.

Colette
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.

Colette
Never wear second-rate jewels, wait till the really good ones come to you.... Rather than a wretched little diamond full of flaws, wear a simple, plainly inexpensive ring. In that case you can say, 'It's a memento. I never part with it, day or night.'

Colette
It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image.

Colette
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
You do flatter yourself, you know, always imagining that you're the only one of your kind.

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

Colette
Explain yourself without gestures. The moment you gesticulate, you look common.

Colette
It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

Colette
I am never completely unhappy, because I ask so little of life... You can't imagine how little it takes to satisfy me.

Colette
The eyes of women followed his progress with silent homage, the more candid among them bestowing that passing stupefaction which can be neither feigned nor hidden.

Colette
There are days when solitude, for someone of my age, is a heady wine which 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
Give me a dozen such heart-breaks, if that would help me to lose a couple of pounds!

Colette
[Sleep is]... that provisional tomb where the living exile sighs, weeps, fights and succumbs, and is born again, remembering nothing, with the day.

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

Colette
I hate guests who complain of the cooking and leave bits and pieces all over the place and cream-cheese sticking to the mirrors.

Colette
Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.

Colette
She could not forgive her sorrow for being bearable and for taking its place, between despair and indifference, in a spiritual region which allowed of diversions, pleasures, scruples, and compensations.

Colette
And there is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask.

Colette
A poet perceives and gives whole-hearted expression to that which our sensibilities, not less lively but less musicianly, keep stored inside.

Colette