Quotes by Jean Rhys

“She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cr...”

“Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless g...”

“Well, that was the end of me, the real end. Two pound ten every Tuesday and a room of the Gray's Inn Road. Saved, rescued and with my place to hide in - what more did I want? I crept in and hid. Th...”

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

“Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand....How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss....”

“Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to...”

“And then the days came when I was alone.”

“It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from und...”

“When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and that he hated me, and it was f...”

“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.”

“Justice. I've heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.”

“The devil prince of this world, but this world dont last so long for mortal man.”

“At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.”

“And Ill look back at him because I shant be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about...”

“Now, money, for the night is coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won't deform my feet (it's not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), mone...”

“What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.”

“When trouble comes, close ranks”

“Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?”

“As soon as I turned the key I saw it hanging, the color of fire and sunset. the colour of flamboyant flowers. If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, I said, your soul is lifted up when it flow...”

“I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.”