Read "Good Morning Midnight" long ago, and it always lingered with me. Her other novels are just as beautiful, just as hysterical, and are sharply feminine. Being a woman is difficult. I'm not joking. If you don't think so, read Jean Rhys. Her descriptions of the things she sees are haunting and menacing, told through twinge of hangover. Many passages because it is five novels in one book.
"There was always a little grey street leading to the stage-door of the theatre and another little grey street where your lodgings were..."
"The print was very small, and the endless procession of words gave me a curious feeling -- sad, excited and frightened. It wasn't what I was reading, it was the look of the dark, blurred words going on endlessly that gave me that feeling."
"There was a glass door behind the sofa. You could see into a small, unfurnished room, and then another glass door led into the walled-in garden. The tree by the back wall was lopped so that it looked like a man with stumps instead of arms and legs. The washing hung limp, without moving, in the grey-yellow light."
"I lay there for a while, listening. The fire was like a painted fire; no warmth came from it."
"Out of the warm room that smells of fur I'll go to all the lovely places I've ever dreamt of."
"There was no sun, but there was a glare on everything like a brass band playing."
"And the sky close to the earth. Hard, blue and close to the earth."
"Take care of yourself and if you can't be good be careful. Etcetera and so on."
"One ruined room for roses, one for orchids, one for tree-ferns. And the honeysuckle all along the steep flight of steps that led down to the room where the overseer kept his books."
"She sent us a postcard from Blackpool or some such town and all she said on it was, "This is a very windy place," which doesn't tell us much about how she is getting on."
"People took the trouble to be witty in those days."
"It clanged, it was so hard."
"I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day."
"I got happier when it got darker. A moth flew into my face and I hit at it and killed it."
"The shadows of the leaves on the wall were moving quickly, like the patterns the sun makes on water."
"People say 'young' as though being young were a crime, and yet they are always scared of getting old."
"The people there were like upholstered ghosts."
"She used to say, 'I feel as if God hates me and my eyes don't fit.'"
"It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running."
"When you start thinking about things the answer's a lemon."
"All the houses seemed to be hotels."
"It was one of those days when you can see the ghosts of all the other lovely days. You drink a bit and watch the ghosts of all the lovely days that have ever been from behind a glass."
"Two eyes open inside your head."
"Yes, you children can come and have your moonlight picnic in the garden but you mustn't throw things at Captain Cameron (Captain Cameron was her cat)"
"I dreamed that I was on a ship. From the deck you could see small islands -- dolls of islands -- and the ship was sailing in a doll's sea, transparent as glass."
"She's a decorative little person -- decorative but strangely pathetic."
"Still, there were moments when she realized that her existence, though delightful, was haphazard. It lacked, as it were, solidity; it lacked the necessary fixed background."
"Good evening," said Mrs Heidler in the voice of a well-educated young male."
"It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach...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."
"She thought of all the corridors and staircases which had led her to this dim, musty-smelling room and felt bewildered and giddy."
"With all their little arrangements, prisons and drains and things, tucked away where nobody can see."
"You'll row your little boat along. You've got your own little charm, and so on."
"Her room on the second floor was large and high-ceilinged, but it had a sombre and one-eyed aspect because the solitary window was very much to one side."
"The picture stood for the idea, the spirit, and the sofa stood for the act." (238)
"She was at once too obvious and too obscure."
"I never used to be like this, but now I'm going dippy, I suppose."
"Your life is your life, and you must be pretty definite about it. Or if it's a story you are making up, you ought at least to have it pat."
"I wanted to go away with just the same feeling a boy has when he wants to run away to sea -- at least, that I imagine a boy has. Only, in my adventure, men were mixed up, because of course they had to be. You understand, don't you? Do you understand that a girl might have that feeling?"
"You wouldn't know a lovely thing if you saw it."
"There was something in a background, say what you like."
"She had laughed at herself in the glass and her teeth were white and sound and even. Yes, she had laughed at herself in the glass. Like an idiot."
"My dear, I wouldn't harrow you for the world. "No harrowing" is my motto."
"The atmosphere of his house enveloped him -- quiet and not without dignity, part of a world of lowered voices, and of passions, like Japanese dwarf trees, suppressed for many generations. A familiar world."
"Women go phut quite suddenly, he thought."
"I had looked at this, I had looked at that, I had looked at the people passing in the street and at a shop-window full of artificial limbs."
"And my dress extinguishes me."
"Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart -- all complete."
"Plat du jour -- boiled eyes, served cold...
"My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafes where they like me and cafes where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I never shall be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't and so on."
"There was a monsieur," the patronne says. There was a monsieur, but the monsieur has gone."
"That is the only advantage women have over men -- at least they can cry."
"I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes -- a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it."
"Yes, I am vexed, I am very vexed...I'll send you a box of Turkish Delight," he says, and rings off."
"Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man."
"Oh God, this awful sinking of the heart -- like going down in a lift."
"This is just the interval when drink makes yo look nice, before it makes you look awful."
"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 -- other have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful. But the 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."
"There is the corner of the bedroom door and the friendly furniture."
"I knew the time of day when though it is hot and blue and there are not clouds, the sky can have a very black look."
"All this was long ago, when I was still babyish and sure that everything was alive, not only the river or the rain, but chairs, looking-glasses, cups, saucers, everything."
"Italy is white pillars and green water. Spain is hot sun on stones, France is a lady with black hair wearing a white dress because Louise was born in France fifteen years ago, and my mother, whom I must forget and prey for as though she were dead, though she is living, like to dress in white."
"Soon I will give the signal. Soon it will be tomorrow morning."
"There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up."
"The flames burned straight."
"I sit at my window and the worlds fly past me like birds -- with God's help I catch some."
"but for that man, money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else."
"I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard."