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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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Jean Rhys
Age: 88 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 24
Died: 1979
Died: May 14
Novelist
Writer
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams
Ella Rees Williams
Almost
Read
Persons
Person
Book
Imagined
Thing
Baby
Strange
Heard

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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 found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.
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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.
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And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
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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.
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I have arranged my little life.
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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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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
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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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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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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.
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If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
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Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.
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Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
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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.
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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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And then the days came when I was alone.
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She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
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Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.
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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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