If he's getting married, he's no longer interesting.

— Colette

It is only in pain that a woman is capable of rising above mediocrity. Her resistance to pain is infinite; one can use and abuse it without any fear that she will die, as long as some childish physical cowardice or some religious hope keeps her from the suicide that offers her a way out.

— Colette

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

— Colette

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.

— Colette

It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer.' So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and he must tactfully let themselves and each other die?'' Let them die,' he repeated. I had accompanied him as far as the revolving glass door of the lobby.' Let them die,' he said again. 'It's less dangerous. I can swear on my word of honor that I never gave a present or made a loan or an exchange of anything except. . . This. . .' He waved both hands in a complicated gesture which fleetingly indicated his chest, his mouth, his genitals, his thighs. Thanks no doubt to my fatigue, I was reminded of an animal standing on its hind legs and unwinding the invisible. Then he resumed his strictly human significance, opened the door, and easily mingled with the night outside, where the sea was already a little paler than the sky.

— Colette

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

— Colette

No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.

— Colette

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.

— Colette

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.", 1964)

— Colette

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

— Colette