Quotes

Interesting Quotes from Judith Therman's Introduction to "Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette"

"Colette's art is that of the lie. But the great game she plays with us, precisely, to stuff her best lies with great flashes of truth. To read her with pleasure thus consists of disentangling, with a deft pair of tweezers, the true from the false."

"The demimonde, and in particular the homosexual demimonde, was Colette's real theater of resistance....'the valiant of voluptuousness.'"

An era when "The Impressionists has challenged objective perception; now Freud was taking on objective consciousness, Proust the truth of memory, and Einstein the absolutes of matter and energy, time and space."

"The ideal purity for Colette is an Edenic state of harmony enjoyed by wild animals, flora, birds of prey, certain sociopaths, and by ordinary humans only as fetuses. To be pure means to be unhindered by conscious bonds of need or dependence, or by any conflict between male and female drives.

"But how, around 1900, could you possibly become an individual - yourself - and a woman? The question is at the heart of everything she writes. 

Re: Gaston "But the experience of love aroused her profoundest mistrust, and perhaps that is why the men in her works tend to be weak, or very young, or contemptible except for pleasure. A man really worth loving would be an invitation to perdition, and she doesn't want to put temptation in her own path, even in the form of a character."