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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
Stop
Write
Death
Must
Writing
Abject
Life
Earned
People
Failure
Already

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As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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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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I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
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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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And then the days came when I was alone.
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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 haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
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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.
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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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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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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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Quite like old times,' the room says.
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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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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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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
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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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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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Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
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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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