Jean Rhys Quotes

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.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

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.

All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.

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

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

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

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

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

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

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

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.

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.

She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.

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.

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

very few people change after well say seven or seventeen. Not really. They get more this or more that and of course look a bit different. But inside they are the same.

She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.

Would you like a whiskey?' I say. 'I've got some.' (That's original. I bet nobody's ever thought of that way of bridging the gap before.)

The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.

Quite like old times,' the room says.

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

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

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.

It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.

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

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

I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.

I took the red dress down and put it against myself. 'Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?' I said.

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).

Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow

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.

I thought if I told no one it might not be true.

The devil prince of this world, but this world don’t last so long for mortal man.

I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering.

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.

At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.

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....

What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.

When trouble comes, close ranks

Do you think that too, " she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?

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.