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I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Form Hold Image Lost Treasure
Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Book Myself Necessary Presence Reading
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Acceptance Flattery Oneself Poet Silence
You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Astonishment Finding Growth Quick Yourself
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.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Age Alone Bitter Freedom Poison Solitude Wall
It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Absence Shape Thinking Time True
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.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Herself Pride Time Virtue
No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Measurement Object Temptation Value
On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us – ah! what a dream, to live in that! – the other stifles us at the first breath.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Breathe Choice Planet Temptation
I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Character Honorable Kind Sound Time
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.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Admit Literature Nourishment Sincere
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.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Artist Authentic Himself Life Ordinary Time Villain
At sixty-three years of age, less a quarter, one still has plans.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Age Grow Up Oneself Planning
Sit down and 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.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Author Criticism Destroy Head Himself Judgement Poet Writing
If he’s getting married, he’s not longer interesting.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Himself Interesting Marriage
Is suffering so very serious? …I’m referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It’s extremely painful… hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain… is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Age Kind Old Pain Respect Serious Suffering Woman Worth