229 Quotes by Jean Rhys

I was thinking, ‘I’m nineteen and I’ve got to go on living and living and living.

It’s so easy to make a person who hasn’t got anything seem wrong.

But they never last, the golden days. And it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon, can’t it? Yes, it can be sad, the afternoon sun, sad and frightening.

It is strange how sad it can be – sunlight in the afternoon, don’t you think?

I have a lot of writing to do and not as much time as you’d think. I do it at night now and look a bit haggard afterwards.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important it finds homes for us everywhere.

I had started out in life trusting everyone and now I trusted no one. So I had a few acquaintances and no close friends. It was perhaps in reaction against the inevitable loneliness of my life that I’d find myself doing bold, risky, even outrageous things without hesitation or surprise. I was usually disappointed in these adventures and they didn’t have much effect on me, good or bad, but I never quite lost the hope of something better or different.

There was a vase of flame-coloured tulips in the hall – surely the most graceful of flowers. Some thrust their heads forward like snakes, and some were very erect, stiff, virginal, rather prim. Some were dying, with curved grace in their death.

Cold – cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.