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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
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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!'
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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.
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Those pleasures so lightly called physical.
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I instinctively like to acquire and store up what looks like outlasting me.
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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
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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
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A wild beast has no need to leap in order to promote fear.
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I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.
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Don't ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman's reputation.
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Instead of marrying 'at once,' it sometimes happens that we marry 'at last.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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How pure are those who have never forced anything open!
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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.
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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.
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Breathe in the pine and mint from the little salt marsh; its fragrance is scratching at the gate like a cat!
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It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
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It is prudent to pour the oil of delicate politeness upon the machinery of friendship.
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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.
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Give me a dozen such heart-breaks, if that would help me to lose a couple of pounds!
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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.
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In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Colette
Creative Commons
Born:
January 28, 1873
Died:
August 3, 1954
(aged 81)
Bio:
Colette was a French novelist nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Her best known work, the novella Gigi, was the basis for the film and Lerner and Loewe stage production of the same name.
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