Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes

beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water

Writing only leads to more writing.

I have found my voice again and the art of using it.

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

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.

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.

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

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

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.

Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss.

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.

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

There are no ordinary cats.

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.

At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak.

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.

A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.

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.

That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!

Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut animals up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph. . . . Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?