Quotes by Jean Rhys

“And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it ...”

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

“I had started out in life trusting everyone and now I trusted no one. So I had a few acquaintances and no close friends. It was perhaps in reaction against the inevitable loneliness of my life that...”

“Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it. Of course, life would soon change, open out, become quite different. You couldn't go on if you didn't hop...”

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

“Your husband certainly love money,' she said. 'That is no lie Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.”

“I had had the job for three weeks. It was dreary. You couldn't read; they didn't like it. I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they...”

“Is it true, she said, that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want ...”

“Well, let's argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in th...”

“Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”

“Anything you like; anything I like... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us”

“I thought if I told no one it might not be true.”

“You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That's the past - or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, cha...”

“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.”

“Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow”

“As for her, I'd forgotten her for the moment. So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and...”

“She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

“These people all fling themselves at me. Because I am uneasy and sad they all fling themselves at me larger than life. But I can put my arm up to avoid the impact and they slide gently to the groun...”

“Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.”

“I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering.”