Quotes from 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.

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.

To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

One of the best things about love is just recognizing a man's step when he climbs the stairs.

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

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.

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.

There is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask.

Those pleasures so lightly called physical.

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.

How can one help shivering with delight when one's hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!

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

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

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

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

It was towards the end of June that incompatibility became established between them like a new season of the year.

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

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

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.

Bulldogs are adorable, with faces like toads that have been sat on.

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 eyes of women followed his progress with silent homage, the more candid among them bestowing that passing stupefaction which can be neither feigned nor hidden.

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

When I had reached my term, I looked like a rat dragging a stolen egg.