Quotes from Jean Rhys

An anxious expression spread over his face as he thought to himself that the time was coming when he would have to give up this comfort, and then that comfort, until God knew what would be the end of it all. In this way he was an imaginative man, and when these fits of foreboding overcame him he genuinely forgot that only a succession of highly improbable catastrophes could reduce him to the penury he so feared.

She had meant to tell him: 'I love you. You aren't making any mistake about that, are you?' But all she said was: 'Please will you draw the curtains?

She had a sweet voice, a voice with a warm and tender quality. This was strange, because her face was cold, as though warmth and tenderness were dead in her.

The fact is,' said Norah, 'that there's something wrong with our family. We're soft, or lazy, or something.' 

Because he has money he's a kind of god. Because I have none I'm a kind of worm. A worm because I've failed and I have no money. A worm because I'm not even sure if I hate you.

All through the meal Mr Horsfield talked without thinking of what he was saying. He was full of an absurd feeling of expectancy.

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

when you are dead to the world, the world rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you

When trouble comes, close ranks

Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that's obeah too.

You shut the door and you pull the curtains and then it's as long as a thousand years and yet so soon ended.

If you think I minded, then you've never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets. Close-up of human nature - isn't it worth something?

I thought I'd try to write her a life

People don't give you what you're worth - not in anything they don't. They give you what they think you're used to.

Why are you sad?

Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer. I knew the time of day when though it is hot and blue and there are no clouds, the sky can have a very black look.

I drank it and I said, 'It isn't like it seems to be.' - 'I know. It never is,' he said

This was the affair which had ended quietly and decently, without fuss or scenes or hysteria. When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it.

She was silence itself.

Desiderio, Odio, Vita, Morte erano terribilmente vicini nell'ombra