Jean Rhys

“All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms have these eyes–others have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful. But they grey sky, which is the background, terrifies me. . . . And the arms wave to an accompaniment of music and of song. Like this: 'Hotcha–hotcha–hotcha. . . .' And I know the music; I can sing the song. . . .”

“Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad...”

“Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary...”

“It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?”

“He says: ‘it doesn’t matter. What I know is that I could do this with you’ — he makes a movement with his hands like a baker, kneading a loaf of bread — ‘and afterwards you’d be different.”

“Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.”

“It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.”

“You surpise me, because people nearly always force you to ask, don't they?”

“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

“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.”

“I wanted it-like iron.”

“What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.”

“She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.”

“...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.”

“He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.”

“Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.”

“The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her.”

“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...”

“I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life.”

“And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?”

“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.”

“....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book.”

“Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.”

“I took the red dress down and put it against myself. 'Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?' I said.”

“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. ”

“A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.”

“Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. ...But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.”

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ”

“Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home.”

“I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.”

“Quite like old times,' the room says.”

“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”

“You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.”