Jean Rhys Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men—at least they can cry.

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

Jean Rhys
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.

Jean Rhys
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water.

Jean Rhys
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
Next week, or next month, or next year I'll kill myself. But I might as well last out my month's rent, which has been paid up, and my credit for breakfast in the morning.

Jean Rhys
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
I feel like a baited bull and look a wreck, and as for my unfortunate brain well I saw it neatly described yesterday on an automatic thing in the tube: This machine is empty till further notice.

Jean Rhys
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
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
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.

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

Jean Rhys
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.

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

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

Jean Rhys
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.

Jean Rhys
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.

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

Jean Rhys
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.

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

Jean Rhys
They sat at a corner table in the little restaurant, eating with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbours to see and know their pleasures.

Jean Rhys
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).

Jean Rhys
As soon as I turned the key I saw it hanging, the color of fire and sunset. the colour of flamboyant flowers. 'If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, ' I said, 'your soul is lifted up when it flowers. Everyone wants that.' She shook her head but she did not move or touch me.

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

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

Jean Rhys
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
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.

Jean Rhys
Only the hopeless are starkly sincere and…only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy.

Jean Rhys
I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.

Jean Rhys
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…Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily.

Jean Rhys