10
" To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy.
To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp.
To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.
To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.… The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar. "
― Colette , The Vagabond
14
" I shall desire you as I desire in turn the fruit that hangs out of reach, the far-off water, and the blissful little house that I pass by. In each place where my desires have strayed, I leave thousands and thousands of shadows in my own shape, shed from me: one lies on the warm blue rocks of the ledges in my own country, another in the damp hollow of a sunless valley, and a third follows a bird, a sail, the wind and the wave. You keep the most enduring of them: a naked, undulating shadow, trembling with pleasure like a plant in the stream. But time will dissolve it like the others, and you will no longer know anything of me until the day when my steps finally halt and there will fly away from me a last small shadow. "
― Colette , The Vagabond
16
" Ich lasse an jedem Ort meiner Sehnsüchte Tausende und aber Tausende Schatten zurück, die sich nach meinem Ebenbild von mir lösen: einer auf dem heißen, blauschimmernden Gestein der Schluchten in meiner Heimat, ein anderer in der feuchten Tiefe eines Tales ohne Sonne und wieder ein anderer, der dem Vogel, dem Segel, dem Wind und den Wellen folgt. Dir aber bleibt der treueste von allen: ein nackter, wogender Schatten, den die Lust schüttelt, wie einen Grashalm im Bach...Aber die Zeit wird ihn auflösen wie alle anderen, und du wirst nichts mehr von mir wissen bis zu dem Tag, an dem mein Weg zu Ende ist und ein letzter kleiner Schatten sich von mir löst... "
― Colette , The Vagabond
