Colette

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.

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.

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

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.

We only do well the things we like doing.

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

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

If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.

Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.

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

When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

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.