Rachael > Rachael's Quotes

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.”
― Jean Rhys, Quartet

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.”
― Jean Rhys

“Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“....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.”
― Jean Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking: With a Selection from The Left Bank

“It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”
― Jean Rhys

“Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary...”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

“You want to know what I'm afraid of? All right, I'll tell you. I'm afraid of men - yes, I'm very much afraid of men. And I'm even more afraid of women. And I'm very much afraid of the whole bloody human race. Afraid of them? Of course I'm afraid of them. Who wouldn't be afraid of a pack of damned hyenas? [...] And when I say afraid - that's just a word I use. What I really mean is that I hate them. I hate their voices, I hate their eyes, I hate the way they laugh. I hate the whole bloody business. It's cruel, it's idiotic, it's unspeakably horrible. I never had the guts to kill myself or I'd have got out of it long ago.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“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?”
― Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

“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.”
― Jean Rhys

“If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.”
― Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. And that's what terrifies you about them. It isn't their cruelty, it isn't even their shrewdness - it's their extraordinary naivete. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliche. Everything is born out of a cliche, rests on a cliche, survives by a cliche. And they believe in the cliches - there's no hope”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“I will write my name in fire red.”
― Jean Rhys

“I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering.”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand....How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss....”
― Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

“It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd fins myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.”
― Jean Rhys