English Prose Quotes

“I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Love is happy only when it is confident. When it is humble, it is full of pain and misgiving; there is hardly any happiness to be had out of it at all.”
― Dorothy Whipple, The Priory

“My father old Cosway, with his white marble tablet in the English church at Spanish Town for all to see. It have a crest on it and a motto in Latin and words in big black letters. I never know such lies. [...] "Pious", they write up. "Beloved by all." Not a word about the people he buy and sell like cattle. "Merciful to the weak", they write up. Mercy! [...] I can still see that tablet before my eye because I go to look at it often. I know by heart all the lies they tell - no one stand up and say, Why you write lies in the church?”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Better not I tell you. You want to know what I do? I say doudou, if you have trouble you are right to come to me. And I kiss her. It's when I kiss her she cry - not before.”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Letty wanted to know every detail of Laura's going. As she asked and listened, her heart beat uncomfortably fast and she felt that, if she did not take care, she would burst into tears. Laura had gone; she had broken away.

'It's not fair! It's not fair!' Letty cried to herself. Laura had got what she wanted; whatever happened to her afterwards she had got, once, what she wanted. She had had the courage to take it.

'Not that I ever wanted to go off with a man,' Letty had thought on the way to Greenbanks with Ambrose. No, she had never seen anyone she wanted to go off with. When she thought of going, it was never with a man. Once she had indulged in wild dreams. For years after she was married she felt that someone would one day come, someone she could love with all her heart, with that high, free elation and that deep satisfaction she could imagine. She would be able to share everything with him; her fears in the night about loneliness, death, the end of things. He would understand, she felt, but he would not explain, for after all there is no explanation. He would laugh, too, at what she laughed at; he would enjoy shop incidents, tram incidents, street incidents - all the queer, funny things that go to make up every day. Letty felt, for years, that someone like this would come before it was too late.

'It's not really me, having the children and living with Ambrose,' she would think in bewilderment. 'This isn't my life really; it will all be different soon. I shall begin to live as I want to - soon.'

But the years went on and now she was over forty and looked for nobody to rescue her as if she were a damsel in distress. She no longer expected to be loved by any man. Men wanted youth and beauty; no matter how old and ugly they were themselves, they felt entitled to youth and beauty in women. She had missed the great love she had dreamed of as a girl, but she thought about it no more. Her wishes had changed as she grew older; she now only wanted to get away by herself, to enjoy life in her own way. [...] She knew what she wanted, but could not have; it was freedom.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks

“All physical love was ugly, she told herself; all - her own, too. She was humiliated at having giving way to it again, humiliated to the earth to have been repulsed. She pressed her knuckles hard against her lips and moaned to herself.

Oh, he was right, he was right to deny the body. It brought the soul low, it degraded, it betrayed. She had finished with it [...]. Never again would she let love move her to warmth; never would she put out a hand to another living creature!

[...] Well, she would conquer her [body] once more. She would tear this love out of her heart, steel herself, and go on, as she had done before - but not here. Not in this house, under these observing eyes, no matter how kind. The kinder the eyes, the more she resented them. Kindness meant interference; and, if no one was kind, no one intruded into her isolation and she could keep on her way with a grim satisfaction at being able to do without everything that made up the happiness of other people. The lust for saying 'no' grew and flourished when she fed it daily; it could dominate her now as it had dominated it before.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Greenbanks