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I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Bad Children Occasional Parents Place Polite
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
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.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Illusion Moments Need Recovery Waste Young
You don’t think before you do something foolish. You do your thinking afterwards.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Fools Thinking Yourself
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
I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Born Country Heart Myself Try Unknown
That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Joy Love Myself Voice
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
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Friendship Mechanism Polite Wisdom
To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Acceptance Flattery Oneself Poet Silence
There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Blue People Wine
In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Absence Finding Furnish Myself Ugly
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
When she raises her eyelids it’s as if she were taking off all her clothes.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Clothes Herself Raise
I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Believe Call Honor Suffering Urgent Wasted Time
One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE

Age Forget Grave Old