Colette Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

A door slamming makes one jump, but it doesn't make one afraid. What one fears is the serpent that crawls underneath it.

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
Artisans, bureaucrats, that's what we writers are! The joys of creation! Novels dashed off in ecstasy in three weeks! Nonsense! Three thousand pages botched and wasted in order to produce two hundred and fifty polished ones.

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

Colette
I have very often deprived myself of the necessities of life, but I have never consented to give up a luxury.

Colette
The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

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

Colette
It was towards the end of June that incompatibility became established between them like a new season of the year. Like a season, it had its surprises and even its pleasures.

Colette
Those pleasures so lightly called physical.

Colette
Jealousy leaves no time to be bored; does it even leave time to grow old?

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
Both legally and familiarly, as well as in my books, I now have only one name, which is my own.

Colette
My cat does not talk as respectfully to me as I do to her.

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

Colette
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.

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