# Colette

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954) was a French writer, usually known simply by her pen-name "Colette."

## Quotes

* When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
** Claudine and Annie (1903)
* 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.
** Freedom (1908)
* Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.
** L'Envers du music hall (Music Hall Sidelights), "On Tour" (1913)
* 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.
** Chéri (1920), pt. 2 (tr. Roger Senhouse)
* Let’s go out and buy playing-cards, good wine, bridge-scorers, knitting needles—all the paraphernalia to fill a gaping void, all that’s required to disguise that monster, an old woman.
** Chéri (1920) (tr. Roger Senhouse)
* It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
** My Mother’s House, "The Priest on the Wall" (1922)
* Le monde des èmotions qu’on nomme, á la lègére, physiques.
** The world of the emotions that we so lightly call physical.
** Le Blè en herbe (The Immature Grain) (1923), p. 161
* 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.
** La Fin de Chéri (The Last of Cheri) (1926) (tr. Roger Senhouse)
* If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love—well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction.
** La Fin de Chéri (The Last of Cheri) (1926) (tr. Roger Senhouse)
* My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
** Break of Day (1928)
* 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?
** Sido (1929)
* We only do well the things we like doing.
** Prisons and Paradise (1932)
* 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.
** Mes Apprentissages (1936)
* You do not notice changes in what is always before you.
** Mes Apprentissages (1936)
* 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.
** Chambre d’Hôtel, "The Rainy Moon" (1940)
* The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.
** Paris From My Window (1944)
* To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
** Paris From My Window (1944)
* 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.
** Noces (1945)
* Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
** Chance Acquaintances (1952)
* You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
** New York World-Telegram and Sun (1961)
* 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.
** Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps
* Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.
** Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps
* 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.
** Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (autobiography, 1966) ed. Robert Phelps
* 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.
** “Wedding Day”, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps
* What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!
** “Sido and I”, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps
* 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.
** "The Captain", Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps
* 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.
** “The South of France”, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps
* 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.
** Journey for Myself (1971) “Beauties,” Quatre Saisons (c. 1928).
* For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.
** In Gigi, and Selected Writings (1963).

### Le Pur et l'Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)

* It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
** Ch. 9
* Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken.
* 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.”
* Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.
* Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

### Gigi (1945)

* In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
** The Photographer’s Wife
* On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath.
** The Photographer’s Wife
* Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.
** Aunt Alicia
* Boredom helps one to make decisions.
** Aunt Alicia
* 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.
** Aunt Alicia

### Barks and Purrs

Barks and Purrs as translated by Maire Kelly
* Toby-Dog: It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling. Kiki-The-Demure: A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand. Toby-Dog: That's wrong. It's indiscreet. Kiki-The-Demure: Not at all. I have a right to everything. Toby-Dog: To everything? And I? Kiki-The-Demure: I don't imagine you lack anything, do you? Toby-Dog: Ah, I don't know. Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come... Kiki-The-Demure: And then what dreadful thing happens? Toby-Dog: You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it — Castor Oil!
* Kiki-The-Demure: Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic. Toby-Dog: I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath.

## Attributed

* If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles,
** As quoted in Close to Colette by Maurice Goudeket

## Quotes about Colette

* (What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few.
** Sandra Cisneros interview (2021)
* I am devoted to those who endured, like Colette. It is easier … to kiss the world a bitter goodbye than to go on working, writing, changing, enduring the slings & arrows of outrageous aging. Colette endured. And she wrote & wrote & wrote. Whenever I feel really depressed, I think of her & keep going.
** Erica Jong as quoted in Mountain Moving Day (1973) by Elaine Gill
* Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide open on life.
** Plaque placed by the city of Paris at the home of Colette, as quoted by Maurice Goudeket in Close to Colette (1957)
* I've felt that her perceptions, her feelings about food, gardens, the sea are beautiful. She was a peasant-that was her saving grace. And yet so elegant in her style. But I love the peasant in her, the one who delights in smells and tastes. I never tasted a of chocolate like her chocolate. And her matchless subtlety. Do remember the episode, I think it's so funny, when they were going to bring her into the Académie Française and they said, oh yes, she's a beautiful writer, a wonderful stylist, but she doesn't write about important things, only about love? She's only writing about love. She meant a lot to me.
** 1974 interview included in Conversations with Anaïs Nin Edited by Wendy DuBow (2011)
* One of the most frequently quoted literary passages on lesbian relationship is that in which Colette's Renée, in The Vagabond, describes "the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps found shelter in each other's arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is often cruel, and there to taste better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail and forgotten [emphasis added]." Colette is often considered a lesbian writer. Her popular reputation has, I think, much to do with the fact that she writes about lesbian existence as if for a male audience; her earliest "lesbian" novels, the Claudine series, were written under compulsion for her husband and published under both their names. At all events, except for her writings on her mother, Colette is a less reliable source on the lesbian continuum than, I would think, Charlotte Brontë, who understood that while women may, indeed must, be one another's allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other's company and attraction to each others' minds and character, which attend a recognition of each others' strengths.
** Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986)

## External links

* Brief biography at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
* Reviews of Colette's Books
* Works by Colette at Project Gutenberg
** Barks and Purrs
* Centre d'études Colette tribute site (in French)
* Another Colette tribute site (in French)