Aging & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Deneuve

It lands like a shrug, but it’s really a quiet manifesto about taste and taboo. Deneuve isn’t making a grand claim about bravery; she’s dismantling a culturally scripted disgust with the calm authority of someone who’s spent a career being watched, categorized, and told what she’s supposed to find repellent. The list is telling: not just mice (the “cute” version), but rats (the one society trains you to hate). She’s refusing the hierarchy.

The intent feels less confessional than calibrating. By grounding it in childhood - “when I was very young” - she gives her preference the alibi of innocence: this isn’t provocation for its own sake, it’s continuity. That move matters because rats, especially, carry moral baggage: urban decay, contamination, the underside of glamour. An actress associated with French elegance admitting affection for vermin is a subtle inversion of her own iconography. It’s Deneuve, the face of refinement, aligning herself with what’s cast out.

“I’m not scared of them” works as the kicker because fear is the socially acceptable cover for prejudice. Disgust can be defended as “instinct,” but fear is easier to narrate. She denies both in one clean sentence, implying that the panic around certain bodies - animal, human, social - is learned. In context, it reads like a small act of aesthetic independence: a reminder that poise isn’t fragility, and that sophistication can include sympathy for the unglamorous.