Best 65 quotes of Sidonie-gabrielle Colette on MyQuotes

A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.

A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude.

Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like some plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal. No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl.

- and how time flies! What, has it already been twenty years, already forty years that we are together? Why, how terrible! We haven't yet said all we wanted to say to each other... May we have a little respite, or else may we be allowed to begin all over again!

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men...

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.

At sixty-three years of age, less a quarter, one still has plans.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

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.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

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.

Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. 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.

I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.

If he's getting married, he's not longer interesting.

If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.

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.

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

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

Is suffering so very serious? ...I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful... hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain... is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts.

I've entered the world of wine without any professional training, but a definite appetite for good bottles.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

On the first of May, with my comrades of the catechism class, I laid lilac, chamomile and rose before the altar of the Virgin, and returned full of pride to show my blessed posy. My mother laughed her irreverent laugh and, looking at my bunch of flowers, which was bringing the may-bug into the sitting-room right under the lamp, she said: Do you suppose it wasn't already blessed before?

On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us - ah! what a dream, to live in that! - the other stifles us at the first breath.

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

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.

Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut animals up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph. . . . Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.