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

Jean Rhys

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Jean Rhys
Age: 88 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 24
Died: 1979
Died: May 14
Novelist
Writer
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams
Ella Rees Williams
Like
Shape
Shapes
Novel
Doesn
Much
Life

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She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
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Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
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When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
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Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.
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Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud - well down - and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like - like Rasputin.
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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.
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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.
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As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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I hadn't bargained for this. I didn't think it would be like this - shabby clothes, worn-out shoes, circles under your eyes, your hair getting straight and lanky, the way people look at you. ... I didn't think it would be like this
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It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
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...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.
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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.
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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.
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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
Jean Rhys
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Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.
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Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
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Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.
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What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.
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