Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette - Page 2

You don't think before you do something foolish. You do your thinking afterwards.

I've entered the world of wine without any professional training, but a definite appetite for good bottles.

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

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.

Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems.

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

Is suffering so very serious? ...I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful... hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain... is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.

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.

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.

At sixty-three years of age, less a quarter, one still has plans.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

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?

The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

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.

A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude.

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men...

Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like some plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal. No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl.

On the first of May, with my comrades of the catechism class, I laid lilac, chamomile and rose before the altar of the Virgin, and returned full of pride to show my blessed posy. My mother laughed her irreverent laugh and, looking at my bunch of flowers, which was bringing the may-bug into the sitting-room right under the lamp, she said: Do you suppose it wasn't already blessed before?