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Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

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
Courses
Course
Living
Able
Would
Illusions
Pathetic
Illusion

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I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
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before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book.
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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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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
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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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Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.
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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.
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The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.
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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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The woman had a humble, cringing manner. Of course, she had discovered that, having neither money nor virtue, she had better be humble if she knew what was good for her.
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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 remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.
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When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.
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Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
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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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Next week, or next month, or next year I will kill myself. But I might as well last out my month's rent, which has been paid up.
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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
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And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
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If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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