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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

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
Deaths
Two
Real
Always
People

More quotes by 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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It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
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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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.
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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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I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
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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Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.
Jean Rhys
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Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.
Jean Rhys
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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.
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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I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.
Jean Rhys
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Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
Jean Rhys
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The woman had a humble, cringing manner. Of course, she had discovered that, having neither money nor virtue, she had better be humble if she knew what was good for her.
Jean Rhys
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Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
Jean Rhys
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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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All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.
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