Jean Rhys > Quotes

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

“Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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...”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“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

“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

“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

“Blot out the moon, pull down the stars. Love in the dark, for we are the dark.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“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. ”
― 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

“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

“If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy, Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time, When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down . I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.”
― Jean Rhys

“....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

“...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

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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...”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Quite like old times,' the room says.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.”
― Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

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

“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 didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.”
― Jean Rhys

“Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary...”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“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

“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 took the red dress down and put it against myself. 'Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?' I said.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“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!”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that's all any room is.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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

“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

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Life if curious when reduced to its essentials”
― Jean Rhys

“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.”
― 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

“...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“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

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea