Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Rhys

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

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

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.

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

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

I have arranged my little life.

Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 want more of this feeling - fire and wings.

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.

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

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

And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?

...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.

As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

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

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.

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.

I am the only real truth I know.

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 sad, sad as a circus-lioness.

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.

He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.

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

And then the days came when I was alone.

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

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

Life if curious when reduced to its essentials

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.

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.

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights.

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

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.