Top 100 Jean Rhys Quotes
#1. I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.
Jean Rhys
#2. Her waist goes in , her hips come out, her long black hair is coiled into a smooth bun on the top of her round head. She is very restful to the tired eye.
Jean Rhys
#3. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.
Jean Rhys
#4. She lifted her eyes. Blank, lovely eyes. Mad eyes. A mad girl.
Jean Rhys
#5. It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
Jean Rhys
#6. Wasn't it quite difficult being a wicked girl? Even more difficult than being a good one?
Jean Rhys
#7. Better not I tell you. You want to know what I do? I say doudou, if you have trouble you are right to come to me. And I kiss her. It's when I kiss her she cry - not before.
Jean Rhys
#8. Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
Jean Rhys
#9. I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn't really care.
Jean Rhys
#10. Next week, or next month, or next year I will kill myself. But I might as well last out my month's rent, which has been paid up ...
Jean Rhys
#11. Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself.
Jean Rhys
#12. I try, but they always see through me. The passages will never lead anywhere, the doors will always be shut.
Jean Rhys
#13. At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.
Jean Rhys
#14. When trouble comes, close ranks
Jean Rhys
#16. If I could choose I would rather be happy than write.
Jean Rhys
#17. Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set. Nobody would know I had ever been in it.
Jean Rhys
#18. I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.
Jean Rhys
#19. That expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.
Jean Rhys
#20. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
Jean Rhys
#21. I can't sleep,' he said. 'Let me lie with my head on your silver breast.
Jean Rhys
#22. Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
Jean Rhys
#23. Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud - well down - and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like - like Rasputin.
Jean Rhys
#24. I have tried," I said, "but he does not believe me. It is too late for that now" (it is always too late for truth, I thought).
Jean Rhys
#25. As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you.
Jean Rhys
#26. And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.
Jean Rhys
#27. I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds - with God's help I catch some.
Jean Rhys
#28. You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That's the past - or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same.
Jean Rhys
#29. It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it's like to try to speak from under water when you're drowned?
Jean Rhys
#30. Rain, forever raining. Drown me in sleep. And soon.
Jean Rhys
#31. There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
Jean Rhys
#32. She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
Jean Rhys
#33. Get up, girl, and dress yourself. Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world."
Christophine to Antoinette
Jean Rhys
#34. Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand ... How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss ...
Jean Rhys
#35. I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
#36. Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
Jean Rhys
#37. Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.
Jean Rhys
#38. You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.
Jean Rhys
#39. A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.
Jean Rhys
#40. It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
Jean Rhys
#41. Soon he'll come in again and kiss me, but differently. He'll be different and so I'll be different. It'll be different. I thought, 'It'll be different, different. It must be different.
Jean Rhys
#42. As soon as I turned the key I saw it hanging, the color of fire and sunset. the colour of flamboyant flowers. 'If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, ' I said, 'your soul is lifted up when it flowers. Everyone wants that.'
She shook her head but she did not move or touch me.
Jean Rhys
#43. She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
Jean Rhys
#44. The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.
Jean Rhys
#45. When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and that he hated me, and it was funny sitting there and talking like that, knowing he hated me.
Jean Rhys
#46. I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.
Jean Rhys
#47. THe room was large and low-ceilinged, the striped wallpaper faded to inoffensiveness. A huge dark wardrobe faced a huge dark bed. The rest of the furniture shrank away into corners, battered and apologetic.
Jean Rhys
#48. Of course, as soon as a thing has happened it isn't fantastic any longer, it's inevitable. The inevitable is what you're doing or have done. The fantastic is simply what you didn't do.
Jean Rhys
#49. May you tear each other to bits, you damned hyenas, and the quicker the better. Let it be destroyed. Let it happen. Let it end, this cold insanity.
Jean Rhys
#50. I took the red dress down and put it against myself. 'Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?' I said.
Jean Rhys
#51. Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple - no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most dearly, isn't it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit.
Jean Rhys
#52. I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.
Jean Rhys
#53. ...poverty is the cause of many compromises.
Jean Rhys
#54. For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy
even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.
Jean Rhys
#55. We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were ... There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours.
Jean Rhys
#56. If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.
Jean Rhys
#57. The woman had a humble, cringing manner. Of course, she had discovered that, having neither money nor virtue, she had better be humble if she knew what was good for her.
Jean Rhys
#58. No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us ... a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.
Jean Rhys
#59. Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.
Jean Rhys
#60. Before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book.
Jean Rhys
#61. Have all beautiful things sad destinies?
Jean Rhys
#62. Only seven or eight, and yet she knew so exactly how to be cruel and who it was safe to be cruel to. One must admire Nature..
Jean Rhys
#63. Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary ...
Jean Rhys
#64. Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she'll have no lover, for I don't want her and she'll see no other.
Jean Rhys
#65. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.
Jean Rhys
#66. And then the days came when I was alone.
Jean Rhys
#67. I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.
Jean Rhys
#68. Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.
Jean Rhys
#69. He says: 'it doesn't matter. What I know is that I could do this with you' - he makes a movement with his hands like a baker, kneading a loaf of bread - 'and afterwards you'd be different.
Jean Rhys
#70. Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow
Jean Rhys
#71. I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness ...
Jean Rhys
#72. Anything you like; anything I like ... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us
Jean Rhys
#73. Now, money, for the night is coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won't deform my feet (it's not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for good clothes, money, money. The night is coming.
Jean Rhys
#74. Your red dress,' she said, and laughed.
But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.
Jean Rhys
#75. When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don't know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it.
Jean Rhys
#76. Sometimes the Earth trembles; sometimes you can feel it breathe.
Jean Rhys
#77. There is always another side, always.
Jean Rhys
#78. There is no control over memory.
Jean Rhys
#79. Morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.
Jean Rhys
#80. I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
Jean Rhys
#81. Your husband certainly love money,' she said. 'That is no lie Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.
Jean Rhys
#82. It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.
Jean Rhys
#83. Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
Jean Rhys
#84. Justice. I've heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.
Jean Rhys
#85. Quite like old times,' the room says.
Jean Rhys
#86. If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We'll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you'll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.
Jean Rhys
#87. Can I help it if my heart beats, if my hands go cold?
Jean Rhys
#88. Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.
Jean Rhys
#89. Have spunks and do battle for yourself
Jean Rhys
#90. Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?
Jean Rhys
#92. I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life.
Jean Rhys
#93. Unhappily children do hurt flies
Jean Rhys
#94. When you insult or injure the unfortunate or the unhappy, you insult Christ Himself and He will not forget, for they are His chosen ones.
Jean Rhys
#95. There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
Jean Rhys
#96. But they left their treasure, gold and more gold. Some of it is found- but the finders never tell, because you see they'd only get one-third then: that's the law of treasure. They want it all, so never speak of it.
Jean Rhys
#97. Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad ...
Jean Rhys
#98. I have arranged my little life.
Jean Rhys
#99. Saved, rescued, but not quite so good as new...
Jean Rhys
#100. Why did you love her?'
'Well,' I say, 'what a question, anyway!'
How on earth can you say why you love people? You might as well say you know where the lightning is going to strike.
Jean Rhys
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