Colette

Les femmes libres ne sont pas des femmes . Free women are not women at all.

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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.

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Girls usually have a papier mache face on their wedding day.

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Insight—the titillating knack for hurting!

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Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

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No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.

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

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Poetry does not necessarily have to be beautiful to stick in the depths of our memory, there to occupy most mischievously the place doomed to invasion by certain melodies which, however blameworthy, can never be expunged.

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The wily lunatic is lost if through the narrowest crack he allows a sane eye to peer into his locked universe and thus profane it.

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It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image.

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

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

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There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment,

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

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There is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask.

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When one can read, can penetrate the enchanted realm of books, why write?

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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.

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

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You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished.

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

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A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

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We only do well the things we like doing.

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Our most perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

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

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

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There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine which 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.

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

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It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

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I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

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Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

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

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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.

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