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I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.
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
Write
Death
Must
Writing
Abject
Life
Earned
People
Failure
Already
Stop
More quotes by Jean Rhys
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.
Jean Rhys
I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
Jean Rhys
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
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
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.
Jean Rhys
And then the days came when I was alone.
Jean Rhys
Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
Jean Rhys
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.
Jean Rhys
There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
Jean Rhys
It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
Jean Rhys
I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.
Jean Rhys
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.
Jean Rhys
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
Jean Rhys
Quite like old times,' the room says.
Jean Rhys
It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
Jean Rhys
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
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.
Jean Rhys
The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
Jean Rhys
I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.
Jean Rhys
I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys