Jean Rhys

Quotes

1. It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'.

2. 

   It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. (first lines of Part One)

3. 

   She said 'darling' with her lips, but her heart was dead. (chapter 5)

4. 

   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. (Part two, 1st section)

5. 

   Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.

6. 

   I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.

7. 

   ...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)

8. 

   I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this.

   This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . .

   p. 109

9. 

   "It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)

10. 

    "...Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.

That’s all the quotes.

10 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more