The Collected Stories Quotes

“It is absurd to suppose that periods empty of love are blank pages in a woman’s life. The truth is just the reverse. What remains to be said about a passionate love affair? It can be told in three lines. He loved me, I loved Him. His presence obliterated all other presences. We were happy. Then He stopped loving me and I suffered.”
― Colette, The Collected Stories

“But though love laughs at difference in age, friendship, especially between two women, is more acutely conscious of it.”
― Colette, The Collected Stories

“Her eyes are beautiful, eloquent, and frightened, and seem to be telling the man: "You're a clumsy lover . . . You don't begin to understand me . . . I don't really know you, and you scare me . . . You sneer at everything I like . . . You lie so well! . . . You possess me completely, yet I can't trust you . . . If you knew what limpid springs you wall up within me because I fear you! 'What am I doing here at your side? Would that this music could free me of you forever! Or else that this violin would stop before I find out any more about you! You yearn for my undoing, not my happiness, and what is worst in me assures you of your victory.”
― Colette, The Collected Stories

“Does she deliberately make herself ugly out of modesty or pride?" Brice wondered, watching his wife walk pigeon-toed, run into the corner of the table, and rub her thigh. "It's a kind of lie, too.”
― Colette, The Collected Stories

“One can't write of love while making love.”
― Colette, The Collected Stories

“That mysterious attraction of what we do not like is always dangerous. It is fatally easy to go on staying in a place which has no soul, provided that every morning offers us the chance to escape.”
― Colette, The Collected Stories