Colette Quotes

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

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shrivelled innocence of an old maid?

In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.

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

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.

What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!

Boredom helps one to make decisions.

Life as a child and then as a girl had taught her patience, hope, silence; and given her a prisoner's proficiency in handling these virtues as weapons.

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.

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.

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.

The world of the emotions that we so lightly call physical.

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.

Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.