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Life if curious when reduced to its essentials

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
Essentials
Life
Reduced
Curious

More quotes by Jean Rhys

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The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.
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.
Jean Rhys
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I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.
Jean Rhys
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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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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.
Jean Rhys
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And then the days came when I was alone.
Jean Rhys
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He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.
Jean Rhys
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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.
Jean Rhys
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It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
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
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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.
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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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?
Jean Rhys
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No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.
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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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.
Jean Rhys
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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
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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Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.
Jean Rhys
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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
Jean Rhys