Jean Rhys Quotes

“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.”

“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…”

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

“I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”

“There is always another side, always.”

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

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

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

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

“Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”

“We were alone in the most beautiful place in the world.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you”

“I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.”