Jean Rhys quotes:

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.

The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.

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.

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

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...

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.

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...

I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness...

And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?"

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'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.

If she says goodbye perhaps adieu. Adieu - like those old time songs she sang. Always adieu (and all songs say it). If she too says it, or weeps, I'll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She's mad but mine, mine. What will I care for gods or devils or for Fate itself. If she smiles or weeps or both. For me.

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.

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.)

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.

Saved, rescued, but not quite so good as new...

I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.

The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset...Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses...When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned.

Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.

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

I had had the job for three weeks. It was dreary. You couldn't read; they didn't like it. I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart - all complete.

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."

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think that the desire to be cruel and to hurt (with words because any other way might be dangerous to ourself) is part of human nature. Parties are battles (most parties), a conversation is a duel (often). Everybody's trying to hurt first, to get in the dig that will make him or her feel superior, feel triumph.

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

I am the only real truth I know.

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.

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

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

...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.

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.

Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home.

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.

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

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.

I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.

Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.

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.

When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.

He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.

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

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.

But why do you want to talk to me?' He is going to say: 'Because you look so kind,' or 'Because you look so beautiful and kind,' or, subtly, 'Because you look as if you'll understand....' He says: 'Because I think you won't betray me.' I had meant to get this mean to talk to me and tell me all about it, and then be so devastatingly English that perhaps I should manage to hurt him a little in return for all the many times I've been hurt.... 'Because I think you won't betray me, because I think you won't betray me....' Now it won't be so easy.

She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.

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.

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.

Life if curious when reduced to its essentials

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

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 haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.

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

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

Quite like old times,' the room says.

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

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.

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.

Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.

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

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.

After all this, what happened? What happened was that, as soon as I had the slightest chance of a place to hide in, I crept into it and hid. Well, sometimes it's a fine day isn't it? Sometimes the skies are blue. Sometimes the air is light, easy to breathe. And there is always tomorrow...

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?

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

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

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.

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.

As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve.

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

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

Sometimes the Earth trembles; sometimes you can feel it breathe.

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.

I have arranged my little life.

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.

London is like a cold dark dream sometimes.

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

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

And then the days came when I was alone.

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

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

There is always the other side, always.

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

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).

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.

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!

And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?

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.

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

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

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

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.

I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.

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

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 ...

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

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.

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

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

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