Colette! > Colette!'s Quotes

“Bah! Suffragettes. I've no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!”
― Jennifer Worth, Shadows of the Workhouse

“The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?” “It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“Families, by and large, like most groups, resist change. If one member of a family wants to move away, this is regarded as a betrayal, for example. If one member of a family is fat and tries to lose weight, often other members of the family will sabotage the effort. If one member of the family wants to get out of a role he or she has been playing for years, this is usually difficult ot do because the rest of the family tries not to let it happen. If your role is clown, you remain the clown. If your role is responsible oldest child, you probably keep that role within your family for your entire life. If you are the black sheep, you'll find it very diffcult to change colors in the eyes of your family no matter how many good deeds you do.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Ironically, it seems that it is by the means of seemingly perfunctory daily rituals and routines that we enhance the personal relationships that nourish and sustain us.”
― Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work

“My goal is to allow readers their own experience of whatever discovery I have made, so that it feels new to them, but also familiar, in that it is a piece with their own experience. It is a form of serious play.”
― Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work

“Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“We mask our needs as the needs of others.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“I told her tea bags were just a convenience for people with busy lives and she said no one is so busy they can't take time to make a decent cup of tea and if you are that busy you don't deserve a decent cup of tea for what is it all about anyway? Are we put into this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?”
― Frank McCourt, 'Tis

“Tis a Fearful Thing

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.

A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –

to be,
And oh, to lose.

A thing for fools, this,

And a holy thing,

a holy thing
to love.

For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.

To remember this brings painful joy.

‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.”
― Judah Halevi

“And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession.
Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly.
What is everything? How did it go on?
I beg your pardon, Sir?
What did you do everyday?
Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties.
You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist?
I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he is not making a joke. He really does not know. Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it's not their fault, it is only how they are brought up.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“And then I thought: 'It's for a warning,'" she continues. "You may think a bed is a peaceful thing, sir. For you it may mean rest, and comfort, and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone. There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. It's where we are born, that's our first peril in life. It's where women give birth, which is often their last. And it's where the act takes place between men and women sir, which I will not mention to you, but I suppose you know what it is. Some call it love, others despair, merely an indignity they must suffer through. And finally beds are what we sleep in, and where we dream, and often where we die.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“The image of Charles Ingalls that emerges from these unsettled early years contains elements of moral ambiguity missing from the portrait his daughter would one day so lovingly polish. Having avoided fighting in the Civil War, he was not above trying to profit from it. Like many in his time, he did not hesitate to put a young and growing family in harm’s way. If he did not know Hard Rope’s reputation, he should have. His dealings with Indians and implicit reliance on the government—to protect settlers from the consequences of their provocative actions and remove Indians from land he wanted—were self-serving. He was willing to press his advantage, to take something that did not belong to him if he thought he could get away with it. These were very different characteristics than the ones his daughter would choose to emphasize decades later. She would never refer to him in print as a “squatter.” But she knew he was.70”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Mary Paterson each published philosophical works early that year. Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom appeared in January 1943; Rand’s The Fountainhead followed in April; Paterson’s The God of the Machine came out in May. Three weird sisters in an antifeminist trifecta, they each celebrated in their books the strapping male as a hero, and exhibited a striking dissociation from what was happening around the world. Emphasizing free will as essential to liberty, the works laid the foundation for the libertarian political movement in the United States.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder