Colette Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
[Men] forgive us — oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own failings.

Colette
But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.

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
In the region where I was born, we always say that during a good meal one is not thirsty but 'hungry' for wine.

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

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
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
What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!

Colette
Your 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
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
When one can read, can penetrate the enchanted realm of books, why write?

Colette
One of the best things about love is just recognizing a man's step when he climbs the stairs.

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

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

Colette
The poet's mission: to forget reality, to promise the world wonders, to celebrate victories and deny death.

Colette