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.
Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition.
There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Baptism is the sacrament of allegiance of them that are to be received into the Kingdom of God, that is to say, into Eternal life, that is to say, to Remission of Sin. For as Eternal life was lost by the committing, so it is recovered by the remitting of men's sins.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
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