Jean Rhys Quotes

I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.

Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe.

Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.

I am the only real truth I know.

Human beings are struggling, and so they are egoists. But it's wrong to say that they are wholy cruel - it's a deformed view.

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

Everything tender and melancholy - as life is sometimes, just for one moment.

I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.

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.

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).

...I know all about myself now, I know. You've told me so often. You haven't left me one rag of illusion to clothe myself in.

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.

I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men — at least they can cry.

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.

Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary.

What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.

There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.

A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.

It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?

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.

I long to be ... Like Other People! The extraordinary, ungetatable, oddly cruel Other People, with their way of wantonly hurting and then accusing you of being thin-skinned, sulky, vindictive or ridiculous.

If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.

It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?

I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.

The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?

Quite like old times,' the room says.

The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.

Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.

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.

I'm no use to anybody,' I say. 'I'm a cérébrale, can't you see that?' Thinking how funny a book would be, called 'Just a Cérébrale or You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming'. Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man. What a pity, what a pity!

But they never last, the golden days. And it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon, can't it? Yes, it can be sad, the afternoon sun, sad and frightening.

I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.

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.

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.

Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.

You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world.

A room? A nice room? A beautiful room? A beautiful room with bath? Swing high, swing low, swing to and fro...This happened and that happened... And then the days came and I was alone.

Blot out the moon, Pull down the stars. Love in the dark, for we're for the dark So soon, so soon.

before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book.

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.

My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.

Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.

I hadn't bargained for this. I didn't think it would be like this - shabby clothes, worn-out shoes, circles under your eyes, your hair getting straight and lanky, the way people look at you. ... I didn't think it would be like this

Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. ...But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.

...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.

If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

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.