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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.

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
Wells
Stabbed
Well
Poisoned
Thing
Muddy
Love
Mud
Like
Knocked
Bleeding
Awful
Rasputin
Terrible
Staggered

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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.
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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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You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world.
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It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
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And then the days came when I was alone.
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He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.
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Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.
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Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.
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that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.
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Life if curious when reduced to its essentials
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Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan - or so he made her believe.
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She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.
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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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I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.
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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
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