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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
Book
Imagined
Thing
Baby
Strange
Heard
Almost
Read
Persons
Person

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When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
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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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We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were... There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours.
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And then the days came when I was alone.
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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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...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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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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Quite like old times,' the room says.
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She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
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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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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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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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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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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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I am the only real truth I know.
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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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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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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
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