C.S. Burrough > C.S.'s Quotes

“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.”
― Jean Rhys

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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“Quite like old times,' the room says.”
― 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

“If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“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

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“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

“Justice," she said. " I've heard that word. It's a cold world. I tried it out," she said, still speaking in that low voice. "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

“The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say, As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
― Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

“I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“I will write my name in fire red.”
― Jean Rhys

“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“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

“Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.”
― Jean Rhys

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

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

“The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka