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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
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Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is a childish vanity in suffering, in suffering better and more than anyone else.
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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.
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A poet perceives and gives whole-hearted expression to that which our sensibilities, not less lively but less musicianly, keep stored inside.
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And there is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask.
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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.
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When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
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I am never completely unhappy, because I ask so little of life... You can't imagine how little it takes to satisfy me.
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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.
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Explain yourself without gestures. The moment you gesticulate, you look common.
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You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
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You do flatter yourself, you know, always imagining that you're the only one of your kind.
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There is no doubt that, if ever my heart were to call my master Chance by another name, I should make an excellent Catholic.
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It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image.
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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.'
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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.
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My virtue's still far too small, I don't trot it out and about yet.
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It is man who has affixed the word 'wild' to the name animal.
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Her childhood, then her adolescence, had taught her patience, hope, silence and the easy manipulation of the weapons and virtues of all prisoners.
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One always writes for someone. Rarely for several people. Never for everyone.
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So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
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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