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.
The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.
There is a place called βheavenβ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.
Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse
A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
In the end, one or the other will triumph - a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.
What is life but a series of inspired follies.
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