Colette Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.

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

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

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
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
In their friendship they were like two of a litter that can never play together without leaving traces of tooth and claw, wounding each other in the most sensitive places.

Colette
It's nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.

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

Colette
The sudden desire to look beautiful made her straighten her back. 'Beautiful! For whom? Why for myself, of course.'

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

Colette
Towards the end I looked like a rat dragging a stolen egg.

Colette
Breathe in the pine and mint from the little salt marsh; its fragrance is scratching at the gate like a cat!

Colette
I know you! Your motto is 'Silk socks and dubious feet.'

Colette
If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.

Colette
And what then is old age? I shall learn. But when it comes I shall no longer be able to understand it.

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
Shall I ever marvel enough at animals? This one is exceptional, like a friend one will never replace, or a perfect lover.

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
My virtue's still far too small, I don't trot it out and about yet.

Colette
A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men... nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us — oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings.

Colette