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Quotes of the day: Colette
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Published Saturday, August 02, 2014 @ 10:51 PM EDT
Aug 02 2014

Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (January 28, 1873 – August 3, 1954). She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

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.

Don't ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman's reputation.

For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.

Give me a dozen such heartbreaks, if that would help me lose a couple of pounds.

Hope costs nothing.

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

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

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.

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.

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

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

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

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.

Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you.

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

Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.

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

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

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.

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.

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.

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

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.

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

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

We only do well the things we like doing.

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

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

Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken.

Who said you should be happy? Do your work.

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

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.

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


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