Colette

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

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

“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. ”
― Colette

“Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.”
― Colette

“Time spent with a cat is never wasted.”
― Colette

“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."

(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette

“There are days when solitude is a heady wine that 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.”
― Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes

“There are no ordinary cats.”
― Colette

“Hope costs nothing. ”
― Colette

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

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”
― Colette

“No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.”
― Colette

“I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.”
― Collette, Chéri

“look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you...”
― Colette

“Be happy.
It's one way of being wise.”
― Colette

“When she raises her eyelids, it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.”
― Colette, Claudine and Annie

“The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.”
― Colette

“I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“If he's getting married, he's not longer interesting.”
― Colette, Gigi and The Cat

“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.”
― Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

“I want nothing from love, in short, but love.”
― Colette, The Vagabond

“To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one. ”
― Colette

“Music is love in search of a word.”
― Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

“Total absence of humor renders life impossible.”
― Colette, Chance Acquaintances and Julie de Carneilhan

“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.”
― Colette, The Vagabond

“But what is the heart, madame? It's worth less than people think. it's quite accommodating, it accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it's not very particular. But the body... Ha! That's something else again! It has a cultivated taste, as they say, it knows what it wants. A heart doesn't choose, and one always ends up by loving.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“I have found my voice again and the art of using it...”
― Colette, The Vagabond

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm!”
― Collette

“To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.”
― Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

“Then, bidding farewell to The Knick-Knack, I went to collect the few personal belongings which, at that time, I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels