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

"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 (Good Morning, Midnight)

"Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

"'Quite like old times,' the room says."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

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

"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did."
— Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea)

"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

"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."
— Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea)

"....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book.'"
— Jean Rhys (Tigers are Better-Looking: With a selection from The Left Bank)

"She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know."
— Jean Rhys

"You surpise me, because people nearly always force you to ask, don't they?"
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"...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."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

"...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"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."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. "
— Jean Rhys (Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography)

"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 (Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography)

"Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

"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 (Good Morning, Midnight)

"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."
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

"'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.)"
— Jean Rhys (Good Morning, Midnight)

"The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"I wanted it-like iron."
— Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie)

"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks."
— Jean Rhys

"All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are 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