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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
Doesn
Much
Life
Like
Shape
Shapes
Novel

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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
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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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Quite like old times,' the room says.
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I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.
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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 under the water. And how do you know what it's like to try to speak from under water when you're drowned?
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
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But they never last, the golden days. And it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon, can't it? Yes, it can be sad, the afternoon sun, sad and frightening.
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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
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Soon he'll come in again and kiss me, but differently. He'll be different and so I'll be different. It'll be different. I thought, 'It'll be different, different. It must be different.
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And then the days came when I was alone.
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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.
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I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.
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The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.
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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
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that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.
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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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It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe.
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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 funny sitting there and talking like that, knowing he hated me.
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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 Stephan - or so he made her believe.
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