I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of personal connections and values over material possessions.
In this quote, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette reflects on the things she treasures most in life, highlighting that personal belongings such as her cat and her desire for solitude and travel hold greater significance than material wealth. This insight underscores the idea that fulfillment comes from intrinsic values rather than external possessions, suggesting a deep connection between identity, freedom, and the pursuit of personal happiness.
In practice
In a motivational speech about minimalism.
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.
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.
I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.
Flaws and all, I believe the free press is our country's most important institution - one I am more than happy to defend. One I did, in fact, defend for 37 years.
Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.
Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.
Sin is the willful transgression of divine law. The Atonement of Jesus Christ is the gift of God to His children to correct and overcome the consequences of sin. The gift of the Atonement of Jesus Christ provides us at all times and at all places with the blessings of repentance and forgiveness.
There is something almost cruel about the Christian's being placed in a world which in every way wants to pressure him to do the opposite of what God bids him to do.
I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience.
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