The Pure and the Impure Quotes

“I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“But what is the heart, madame? It's worth less than people think. it's quite accommodating, it accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it's not very particular. But the body... Ha! That's something else again! It has a cultivated taste, as they say, it knows what it wants. A heart doesn't choose, and one always ends up by loving.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“Youth is not the age to seduce, it's the age to be seduced.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“I liked being with him, as I like being with swift animals who are motionless when at rest.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“- and how time flies! What, has it already been twenty years, already forty years that we are together? Why, how terrible! We haven't yet said all we wanted to say to each other... May we have a little respite, or else may we be allowed to begin all over again!”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight. For it is the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench and optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“i heard on their lips the language of passion, of betrayal and jealousy, and sometimes despair - languages with which I was all too familiar.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“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.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“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.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“I have nothing to say to men and never had. Judging from the little time I’ve spent with them, their usual conversation is sickening. Besides, they bore me. I believe,” he hesitated, then concluded, “I believe I don’t understand men.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“Lecz kobiecie z trudem przychodzi nie oddac sie mezczyznie”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“Niczego mi w zyciu nie braklo, ani urody, ani szczescia, ani nieszczescia; ani mezczyzn, ani kobiet...to dopiero mozna nazwac zyciem!”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“Istnieje mniej sposobow uprawiania milosci, niz sie mowi, lecz duzo wiecej, niz sie mysli.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure