Colette Quotes

It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

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

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

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.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

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

But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.

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