Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

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

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

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

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.

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

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

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.

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.

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

Hope costs nothing.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, 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.

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

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

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

There are no ordinary cats.

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.

No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.

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.

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

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

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

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.

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.