Selected Colette Quotations
• 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.
• A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.
• What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
• If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.
• Be happy. It's one way of being wise.
• Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.
• We only do well the things we like doing.
• Hope costs nothing.
• 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.
• By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.
• Writing only leads to more writing.
• 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.
• 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.
• To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
• Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
• Don't ever wear artistic jewellery; it wrecks a woman's reputation.
• It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
• What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!
• Give me a dozen such heartbreaks, if that would help me lose a couple of pounds.
• 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.
• Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you.
• For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.
• 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.
• The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.
• My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
• The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.
• When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
• A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
• Her childhood, then her adolescence, had taught her patience, hope, silence and the easy manipulation of the weapons and virtues of all prisoners.
• It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
• 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.
• 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.
• Boredom helps one to make decisions.
