38 quotes
Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.
Gigi (1945)
We only do well the things we like doing.
Prisons and Paradise (1932)
Let’s go out and buy playing-cards, good wine, bridge-scorers, knitting needles—all the paraphernalia to fill a gaping void, all that’s required to disguise that monster, an old woman.
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
Le Pur et l'Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)
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.
But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.
Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.
Le Pur et l'Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)
Life as a child and then as a girl had taught her patience, hope, silence; and given her a prisoner's proficiency in handling these virtues as weapons.
Boredom helps one to make decisions.
Gigi (1945)
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken.
Le Pur et l'Impur (The Pure and the Impure) (1932)
The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.
Noces (1945)
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?
Sido (1929)
You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.
Journey for Myself (1971)
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.
Freedom (1908)
On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath.
Gigi (1945)
If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles
Attributed