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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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Jean Rhys
Age: 88 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 24
Died: 1979
Died: May 14
Novelist
Writer
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams
Ella Rees Williams
Look
Straight
Looks
Shoes
Way
Clothes
Lanky
Would
Hair
Bargained
Think
Eyes
Shabby
Thinking
Getting
Worn
Like
Eye
Hadn
People
Didn
Circles
More quotes by Jean Rhys
I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.
Jean Rhys
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
She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
Jean Rhys
After all this, what happened? What happened was that, as soon as I had the slightest chance of a place to hide in, I crept into it and hid. Well, sometimes it's a fine day isn't it? Sometimes the skies are blue. Sometimes the air is light, easy to breathe. And there is always tomorrow.
Jean Rhys
I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.
Jean Rhys
Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
Jean Rhys
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
What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.
Jean Rhys
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
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
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
I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
Jean Rhys
I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
Jean Rhys
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
Jean Rhys
The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.
Jean Rhys
And then the days came when I was alone.
Jean Rhys
As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Jean Rhys
When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
Jean Rhys
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
