Quotes from Colette

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

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

Be happy. It's one way of being wise

Hope costs nothing.

The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

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

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

Friendship, which is of its nature a delicate thing, fastidious, slow of growth, is easily checked, will hesitate, demur, recoil where love, good old blustering love, bowls ahead and blunders through every obstacle.

When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

We only do well the things we like doing.

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.

look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still 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.

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.

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

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)

There are no ordinary cats.

Hope costs nothing.

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

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

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