Jean Rhys
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.Collection: Home
I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men - at least they can cry.
Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
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.Collection: Life
Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.Collection: Dream
It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.Collection: Easy
Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Nice
Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.Collection: Heart
I am the only real truth I know.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Beautiful
A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.Collection: Rooms
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Being Yourself
There is always the other side, always.Collection: Sides
I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.Collection: Hurt
Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary.Collection: Sacrifice
Sometimes the Earth trembles; sometimes you can feel it breathe.Collection: Earth
The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve.Collection: Beautiful
The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.Collection: Friday
If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.Collection: People
Have all beautiful things sad destinies?Collection: Beautiful
There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.Collection: Real
All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.Collection: Book
I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.Collection: Lioness
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.Collection: Life
I have arranged my little life.Collection: Littles
When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.Collection: Writing
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?Collection: Betrayal
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.Collection: Wings
I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.Collection: Past
As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.Collection: World
He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.Collection: Wind
Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.Collection: Thinking
Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.Collection: Lasts
Blot out the moon, Pull down the stars. Love in the dark, for we're for the dark So soon, so soon.Collection: Stars
I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Beautiful
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!Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Thinking
She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.Collection: Would Be
Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.Collection: Book
London is like a cold dark dream sometimes.Collection: Dream
It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Fear
She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.Collection: Want
It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?Collection: Thinking
Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.Collection: Forgotten