"In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness."
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Quote collection
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette quotes (page 4 of 4)
80 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak."
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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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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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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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"Hope costs nothing."
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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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"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."
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"Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems."
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"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."
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"So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days."
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"That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!"
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"You don't think before you do something foolish. You do your thinking afterwards."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually."
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"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."
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"No one asked you to be happy. Get to work."
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