Colette Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

It's terrible to think, as I do every time I begin a book, that I no longer have, and never have had, any talent.

Colette
What an interesting life I had. And how I wish I had realized it sooner!

Colette
Only in the snow can both sexagenarian and child squat on the same small sledges and abandon themselves to the slopes. They feel alike and exchange smiles... O simple, precarious, eternal realm of snow!

Colette
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.

Colette
The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful.

Colette
I am just over an attack of grippe-bronchitis, very unpleasant at my ages (I have two or three).

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
Neither knowledge nor diligence can create a great chef. Of what use is conscientiousness as a substitute for inspiration?

Colette
If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love — well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction.

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

Colette
But once I had set out, I was already far on my way.

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

Colette
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.

Colette
Ah, how much I like you, how well we get on, when you're asleep and I'm awake.

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
I am a pear that has survived a hailstorm: when it does not rot, it becomes better and sweeter than the others, in spite of its little scars.

Colette
The tomcat is behaving consistently. On arrival, he struck his forehead and cried 'But of course! This is where I climb up a mulberry tree and sing at the top of my voice and then do battle with a white cat!'

Colette
To lift and penetrate and tear apart the soil is a labour — a pleasure — always accompanied by an exultation that no unprofitable exercise can ever provide.

Colette
Those pleasures so lightly called physical.

Colette
I instinctively like to acquire and store up what looks like outlasting me.

Colette
Friendship, which is of its nature a delicate thing, fastidious, slow of growth, is easily checked, will hesitate, demur, recoil where love, good old blustering love, bowls ahead and blunders through every obstacle.

Colette
Kiki-The-Demure: Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic.
Toby-Dog: I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath.

Colette
A wild beast has no need to leap in order to promote fear.

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

Colette
Instead of marrying 'at once,' it sometimes happens that we marry 'at last.'

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
Let's buy a pack of cards, good wine, bridge scores, knitting needles, all the paraphernalia needed to fill an enormous void, everything needed to hide that horror—the old woman.

Colette
Adventures happen to people who, by their composure, their unshakableness, and their scorn of the unusual may be said to deserve them. They leave little or no trace.

Colette
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.

Colette