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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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And then the days came when I was alone.
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Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
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Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.
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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.
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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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The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.
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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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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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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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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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What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.
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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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before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book.
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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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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
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I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.
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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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.
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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
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Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe.
Jean Rhys