Quotes by Jean Rhys

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

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

“The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say, As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

“She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.”

“We cant all be happy, we cant all be rich, we cant all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were ... Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily”

“Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. Its more often a succession of jerks.”

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesnt have any.”

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

“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”

“Then another clear voice, as young and as ancient as Spring, like the song of a glad water flowing down into the night from a bright morning in the hills, came falling like silver to meet them.”

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesnt 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 Id find myself doing bold, risky, even outrageous things without hesitation or surprise. I was usually disappointed in these adventures and they didnt have much effect on me, good or bad, but I never quite lost the hope of something better or different.

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 couldnt go on if you didnt hope that, could you? But for the time being there was no doubt that it was pleasant to get away from it. And books could take her away.

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 Id been afraid for a long time, Id been afraid for a long time. Theres fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.

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 to wake up.’‘Well’, I answered annoyed, ‘that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.’‘But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?’‘And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?’‘More easily,’ she said, ‘much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

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 cant see nothing else.