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Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.

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
True
Dream
Magic
Rest
Lying

More quotes by 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.
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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If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
Jean Rhys
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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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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.
Jean Rhys
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I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.
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 hadn't bargained for this. I didn't think it would be like this - shabby clothes, worn-out shoes, circles under your eyes, your hair getting straight and lanky, the way people look at you. ... I didn't think it would be like this
Jean Rhys
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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
Jean Rhys
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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.
Jean Rhys
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When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
Jean Rhys
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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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I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.
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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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
Jean Rhys
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Quite like old times,' the room says.
Jean Rhys
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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.
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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I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
Jean Rhys
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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