Jean Rhys

Quotes

1. 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. (chapter 12)

2. 

   She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)

3. 

   I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day. (Part One, 7th section)

4. 

   When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. (chapter 6)

5. 

   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. (chapter 3)

6. 

   So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)

7. 

   'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?'

   There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in flight of steps. What they call an impasse.

   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.

8. 

   She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

9. 

   They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)

10. 

    I thought if I told no one it might not be true.

11. 

    I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing.

12. 

    The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)