Quotes by Jean Rhys

“Your red dress, she said, and laughed.But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will...”

“When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don't know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it.”

“The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset...Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses...When they had finished, ...”

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

“May you tear each other to bits, you damned hyenas, and the quicker the better. Let it be destroyed. Let it happen. Let it end, this cold insanity.”

“Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.”

“Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.”

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

“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 quit...”

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

“But in the daytime it was all right. And when you'd had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world because anything might happen. I don't know how people live when they know exactly ...”

“It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?”

“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...”

“I am the only real truth I know.”

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

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

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

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

“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 ...”

“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 wan...”