Colette

We only do well the things we like doing.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Friendship which is of its nature a delicate thing fastidious slow of growth is easily checked will hesitate demur recoil where love good old blustering love bowls ahead and blunders through every obstacle.

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

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

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

You will do foolish things but do them with enthusiasm.

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.

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)

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

The more sensitive the lunatic, the less able is he to resist this prying interest of the normal human being. I felt that Renée's change of key - to myself, I compared Renée to a sweet melody, a little flat despite its laborious harmonies - was approaching.

By associating with the cat, one only risks becoming richer.

There are no ordinary cats.

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.

There are days when solitude 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.

Hope costs nothing.