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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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Jean Rhys
Age: 88 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 24
Died: 1979
Died: May 14
Novelist
Writer
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams
Ella Rees Williams
Thinking
Choose
Rather
Happy
Write
Writing
Think

More quotes by Jean Rhys

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I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
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I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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 sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.
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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.
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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.
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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
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She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
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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.
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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
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I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.
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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.
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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.
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