229 Quotes by Jean Rhys

Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud – well down – and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like – like Rasputin.

He says: ‘it doesn’t matter. What I know is that I could do this with you’ – he makes a movement with his hands like a baker, kneading a loaf of bread – ’and afterwards you’d be different.

A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.

I’d planned to die at thirty, and then I’d push it on ten years, forty, and then fifty, You always push it on. And then you go on and on and on. It’s difficult. Too much trouble. I’ve thought about death a great deal. One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, ‘Damn it, I’ll sit down. I can’t go on. I’m tired of living here in the snow and ice.’ So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.

Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it. Of course, life would soon change, open out, become quite different. You couldn’t go on if you didn’t hope that, could you? But for the time being there was no doubt that it was pleasant to get away from it. And books could take her away.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn’t have any.

That was when it was sad, when you lay awake at night and remembered things. That was when it was sad, when you stood by the bed and undressed, thinking, “When he kisses me, shivers run up my back. I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad. That has no meaning, absolutely none. Just words. But something about the darkness of the streets has a meaning.

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.

Next week, or next month, or next year I will kill myself. But I might as well last out my month’s rent, which has been paid up...