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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
Streets
Room
Rooms
Part
Musty
Life
Bugs
Smell
Street
Outside

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All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.
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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
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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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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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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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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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As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
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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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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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The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.
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Human beings are struggling, and so they are egoists. But it's wrong to say that they are wholy cruel - it's a deformed view.
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And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
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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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And then the days came when I was alone.
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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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I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
Jean Rhys
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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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Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
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Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.
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When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
Jean Rhys