Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
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.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle 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.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
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.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Hope costs nothing.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle 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.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman does not.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Don’t ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable
stock-in-trade with the men… nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us – oh! – for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Music is love in search of a word.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
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.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
When she raises her eyelids it’s as if she were taking off all her clothes.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
I want nothing from love, in short, but love.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a
cigarette.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and
gratitude.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
We only do well the things we like doing.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine – if you have never visited it – the desolate kingdom where it rules.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Writing only leads to more writing.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
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.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
The cat is the animal to whom the Creator gave the biggest eye, the softest fur, the most
supremely delicate nostrils, a mobile ear, an unrivaled paw and a curved claw borrowed from the rose-tree.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
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.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Time spent with a cat is never wasted.
– Sidonie-Gabrielle 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