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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.

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
Everything
Stop
Children
Wisdom
Something
Child
Force
Others
Happens
Suddenly
Become
Lose
Soul
Loses

More quotes by Jean Rhys

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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 are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
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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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When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and that he hated me, and it was funny sitting there and talking like that, knowing he hated me.
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As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
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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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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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Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.
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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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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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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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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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And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
Jean Rhys
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I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
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I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.
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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
Jean Rhys
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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.
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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She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
Jean Rhys