novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954). She is best known for her novel Gigi
, upon which Lerner and Loewe
based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.
Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph Colette and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie "Sido" Colette, (nėe Landoy) in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye
, Yonne
, in the Burgundy Region of France.
When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.
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.
Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.
Her childhood, then her adolescence, had taught her patience, hope, silence and the easy manipulation of the weapons and virtues of all prisoners.
It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.
My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shrivelled innocence of an old maid?
We only do well the things we like doing.
By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.