Quote

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

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And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
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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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It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.
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It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it's like to try to speak from under water when you're drowned?
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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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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.
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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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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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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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Human beings are struggling, and so they are egoists. But it's wrong to say that they are wholy cruel - it's a deformed view.
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I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness.
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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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It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?
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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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I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.
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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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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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She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.
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There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.
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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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