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
It is prudent to pour the oil of delicate politeness upon the machinery of friendship.

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
For me, being rich means to possess — apart from the tenderness of a loved one and my friends — a bit of ground, a car that runs, good health, and the freedom not to work when I don't want to, or cannot.

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
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
I would like to leave a great reputation among those creatures who having kept, on their fur and in their souls, the trace of my passage, madly hoped for a single moment that I belonged to them.

Colette
There is a childish vanity in suffering, in suffering better and more than anyone else.

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

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

Colette
I look like a discouraged beetle battered by the rains of a spring night. I look like a moulting bird. I look like a governess in distress. I look — Good Lord, I look like an actress on tour, and that speaks for itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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