Jean Rhys Quotes - Page 2

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

All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.

I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.

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

I have arranged my little life.

...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.

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

Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home.

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

The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?

I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.

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.

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.

Life if curious when reduced to its essentials

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.

After all this, what happened? What happened was that, as soon as I had the slightest chance of a place to hide in, I crept into it and hid. Well, sometimes it's a fine day isn't it? Sometimes the skies are blue. Sometimes the air is light, easy to breathe. And there is always tomorrow.

I took the red dress down and put it against myself. 'Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?' I said.

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.

The woman had a humble, cringing manner. Of course, she had discovered that, having neither money nor virtue, she had better be humble if she knew what was good for her.

...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.

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.

No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.

I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.

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

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.