Time & Perspective Quote by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Colette’s line has the clean snap of someone refusing the two most marketable emotions about time: shame and nostalgia. It’s not a dreamy affirmation; it’s a disciplined stance. By pairing “I love my past” with “I love my present,” she declines the usual hierarchy where the past is either a courtroom (guilty verdicts, moralizing) or a museum (soft-lit longing). Love, here, is not sentimental. It’s an insistence on continuity: the self does not get to disown earlier versions just because they’re inconvenient to explain.

The second sentence sharpens the blade. “Not ashamed of what I have had” reads as more than a tidy defense of experience; it’s Colette’s pointed rebuttal to a culture eager to police women’s appetites, reputations, and romantic histories. “Had” is doing double work: possessions, lovers, chances, freedoms. She refuses the narrative that a woman’s past is a liability that must be laundered into respectability.

Then comes the twist: “not sad because I no longer have it.” That’s not denial; it’s anti-commodified grief. Colette grants that loss exists without letting it become an identity. The subtext is an ethic of presence that still honors the archive: what’s gone can be treasured without being re-purchased through regret. In a life marked by scandal, reinvention, and public scrutiny, the intent lands as authorial authority: I will not let your judgment, or my own longing, write my story for me.