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You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world.

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
World
Pretend
Alone
Fall
Away
Place
Beautiful
Long
Time
Falls

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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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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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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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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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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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It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
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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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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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She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
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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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One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.
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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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I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
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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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She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
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After all this, what happened? What happened was that, as soon as I had the slightest chance of a place to hide in, I crept into it and hid. Well, sometimes it's a fine day isn't it? Sometimes the skies are blue. Sometimes the air is light, easy to breathe. And there is always tomorrow.
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.
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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
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