Jean Rhys Quotes

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.

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

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

Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.

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.

I am the only real truth I know.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There is always the other side, always.

I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.

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

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

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

Sometimes the Earth trembles; sometimes you can feel it breathe.

The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.

If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.

Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary.

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

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.

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.

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

I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.