Colette Quotes (1873-1954)

“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 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.”

“(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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“For brevity, for wit that began back in the observation of the eye which produced it; for the loving openness, almost transparency, of all the senses to the moment passing, its time and place; for a recognition of the essence of that tension (of whatever name or quality) existing between and among the human beings and sometimes the cat in a room together; for a recording of feeling as strict as a seismograph's; perhaps best of all for a real gaiety, a real laughing gaiety-for these things we will value, honor, study, and above all delight in Colette.”