A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the profound connection between nature and human emotion, questioning the place of organized religion in the natural world.
Colette's quote reflects on a moment of pure emotional experience, where a mother connects deeply with nature, transcending the boundaries set by human-created religions. The imagery of her being 'motionless with excitement' suggests a state of inner peace and spiritual fulfillment found in the natural world rather than in structured beliefs, illustrating a perspective that values personal connection to nature over institutionalized religion.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of nature in our lives.
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.
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.
Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
Know not to revere human things too much.
To come to know that nothing is good, nothing is bad, is a turning point; it is a conversion. You start looking in; the outside reality loses meaning. The social reality is a fiction, a beautiful drama; you can participate in it, but then you donβt take it seriously. It is just a role to be played; play it as beautifully, as efficiently, as possible. But donβt take it seriously, it has nothing of the ultimate in it.
The development of man is a return to an original perfection.
People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
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