Quotes from Jean Rhys

The Place Blanche, Paris, Life itself. 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.

We'll put Mado on the joy wheel, and watch her being banged about a bit. Well, she ought to amuse us sometimes; she ought to sing for her supper; that's what she's here for, isn't it?

Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself.

Lois doesn't want to be given away; she doesn't want anybody to know, and I assure you that that's all she cares about. Of course, she'll be furious if anybody knows, and that's why if you go off in a hurry you will make things difficult for me.' She felt hypnotized as she listened to him, impotent.

There is no control over memory.

He was still looking steadily at her. His eyes were clear, cool and hard, but something in the depths of them flickered and shifted. She thought: 'He'd take any advantage he could -- fair or unfair. Caddish he is.' Then as she stared back at him she felt a great longing to put her head on his knees and shut her eyes. To stop thinking. Stop the little wheels in her head that worked incessantly. To give in and have a little peace. The unutterably sweet peace of giving in.

We sat under the mango tree and I was holding his hand when he began to cry. Drops fell on my hand like the water from the dripstone in the filter in our yard. Then I began to cry too and when I felt my own tears on my hand I thought, 'Now perhaps we're married. 'Yes, certainly, now we're married,' I thought.

I stopped going out; I stopped wanting to go out. That happens very easily. It's as if you had always done that - lived in a few rooms and gone from one to the other.

With you, I don't want to do bad things.' 'There's always the one that you don't want to do bad things with, isn't there?' 'Yes, there's always the one,' he says. 'I want to lie close to you and feel your arms around me.' — And tell me everything, everything. . . . He has said that bit before.

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

A vague procession of towns all exactly alike, a vague procession of men also exactly alike. One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn't what one had expected of life. Not in the very least.

I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing.

She was certainly rather drunk. Her eyes were fixed as if upon some far-off point. She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage.

Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die.

So darned easy to plot that - and always at the last moment - one is afraid. Or cheats oneself with hope.

But what if it were heaven when she got there?

But are you telling me the real secret, how to be exactly like everybody else? Tell me, for I am sure you know. If it means being deaf, then I'll be deaf. And if it means being blind, then I'll be blind.

You didn't ask to be born, you didn't make the world as it is, you didn't make yourself as you are. Why torment yourself? Why not take life just as it comes ? You have the right to; you are not one of the guilty ones. When you aren't rich or strong or powerful, you are not a guilty one. And you have the right to take life just as it comes and to be as happy as you can.

You didn't ask to be born, you didn't make the world as it is, you didn't make yourself as you are. Why torment yourself? Why not take life just as it comes? You have the right to; you are not one of the guilty ones. When you aren't rich or strong or powerful, you are not a guilty one. And you have the right to take life just as it comes and to be as happy as you can.

When my first love affair came to an end I wrote this poem: I didn't know I didn't know I didn't know.

Está muy disgustado porque nunca le das un beso. La contradije: —Pues no pone cara de disgustado. —Es un grave error juzgar por la cara, en uno u otro sentido.

I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did.

Vi a Antoinette tendida en cama, absolutamente inmóvil. Como una muñeca. Incluso cuando me amenazó con la botella, había en ella cierta calidad de marioneta.

When man don't love you, more you try, more he hate you, man like that. If you love them they treat you bad, if you don't love them they after you night and day bothering your soul case out.