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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
Bleeding
Awful
Rasputin
Terrible
Staggered
Wells
Stabbed
Well
Poisoned
Muddy
Thing
Mud
Love
Knocked
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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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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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When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
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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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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
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As it was in the beginning, ... is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
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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 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 am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
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She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
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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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All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
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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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And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
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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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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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If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
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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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