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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.

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
Illusion
Havens
Haven
Told
Often
Left
Clothe
Rags

More quotes by Jean Rhys

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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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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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I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
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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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And then the days came when I was alone.
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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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Quite like old times,' the room says.
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Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.
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I have arranged my little life.
Jean Rhys
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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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As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Jean Rhys
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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.
Jean Rhys
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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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Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.
Jean Rhys
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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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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.
Jean Rhys
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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.
Jean Rhys
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She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
Jean Rhys
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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