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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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Jean Rhys
Age: 88 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 24
Died: 1979
Died: May 14
Novelist
Writer
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams
Ella Rees Williams
Moments
Wary
Past
Sentimental
Make
Cold
Practice
Future
Moment
Difficult
Makes
Embarrass
More quotes by 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
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
All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.
Jean Rhys
It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
Jean Rhys
If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
Jean Rhys
And then the days came when I was alone.
Jean Rhys
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
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
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
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
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
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
before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book.
Jean Rhys
It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
Jean Rhys
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
I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.
Jean Rhys
I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
Jean Rhys
The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.
Jean Rhys
I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.
Jean Rhys
...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
