Aging & Wisdom Quote by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Colette refuses the dignified twilight role society keeps on standby for older women: serene, settled, safely unsurprised. The opening command - "You must not pity me" - is a slap at the condescension baked into age talk, where astonishment is treated as naivete and endurance as the only respectable talent. She flips the premise. Wonder isn’t a childish defect; it’s a practiced stance, a survival technique, even a kind of rebellion.

The line works because it turns "still astonished" into a quiet boast. "Still" implies the world has tried to sand her down with repetition, grief, and routine. Astonishment becomes proof that the self remains porous, receptive, un-domesticated. Colette isn’t selling wide-eyed innocence; she’s defending alertness. There’s an implied ethics here: staying astonished means refusing to let experience harden into certainty. It keeps the mind agile, the senses awake, the ego less imperial.

Context sharpens the edge. Colette lived through fin-de-siecle decadence, two world wars, shifting sexual mores, and a culture that alternately fetishized and punished female autonomy. Her work is famously sensuous and observational, attentive to bodies, rooms, small gestures - the stuff complacency stops noticing. In that light, astonishment reads like an artist’s discipline: to see as if for the first time is not a mood but craft.

"Not growing old too quickly" is the kicker: age isn’t just years; it’s a posture. Colette’s antidote isn’t denial but curiosity, the refusal to be finished.