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.
The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood - and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and - as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis - emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.
All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.
When you achieve equality, and freedom, and fairness, it's not because I grant it to you. It's because you fought for it because it is your right. This is not about benevolence or charity; it is about every human being's God-given right.
The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.
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