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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.

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
Outside
Streets
Room
Rooms
Part
Musty
Life
Bugs
Smell
Street

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Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
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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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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
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I am the only real truth I know.
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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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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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Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.
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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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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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Quite like old times,' the room says.
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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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She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.
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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
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I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.
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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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He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.
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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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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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