Top 120 Jean Rhys Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world...”

— Jean Rhys

2. “There is always the other side, always.”

— Jean Rhys

3. “The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.”

— Jean Rhys

4. “Blot out the moon, Pull down the stars. Love in the dark, for we’re for the dark So soon, so soon.”

— Jean Rhys

5. “Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad...”

— Jean Rhys

6. “I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.”

— Jean Rhys

7. “I am the only real truth I know.”

— Jean Rhys

8. “Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest’s a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here.”

— Jean Rhys

9. “If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.”

— Jean Rhys

10. “Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest’s a lie.”

— Jean Rhys

11. “I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.”

— Jean Rhys

12. “Everything tender and melancholy – as life is sometimes, just for one moment.”

— Jean Rhys

13. “Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only – to be left alone.”

— Jean Rhys

14. “It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it’s like to try to speak from under water when you’re drowned?”

— Jean Rhys

15. “Justice. I’ve heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.”

— Jean Rhys

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

— Jean Rhys

17. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

18. “Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”

— Jean Rhys

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

— Jean Rhys

20. “Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armor at home.”

— Jean Rhys

21. “Nothing left but hopelessness.′ Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die.”

— Jean Rhys

22. “All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”

— Jean Rhys

23. “The devil prince of this world, but this world don’t last so long for mortal man.”

— Jean Rhys

24. “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...”

— Jean Rhys

25. “I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness...”

— Jean Rhys

26. “She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.”

— Jean Rhys

27. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”

— Jean Rhys

28. “When I think about it, if I had to choose, I’d rather be happy than write.”

— Jean Rhys

29. “Human beings are struggling, and so they are egoists. But it’s wrong to say that they are wholy cruel – it’s a deformed view.”

— Jean Rhys

30. “If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.”

— Jean Rhys

31. “I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”

— Jean Rhys

32. “London is like a cold dark dream sometimes.”

— Jean Rhys

33. “I took the red dress down and put it against myself. ‘Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?’ I said.”

— Jean Rhys

34. “I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds – with God’s help I catch some.”

— Jean Rhys

35. “It’s funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl’s clothes cost more than the girl inside them?”

— Jean Rhys

36. “There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.”

— Jean Rhys

37. “And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?”

— Jean Rhys

38. “The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve.”

— Jean Rhys

39. “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”

— Jean Rhys

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

— Jean Rhys

41. “She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.”

— Jean Rhys

42. “Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green.”

— Jean Rhys

43. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

44. “I want more of this feeling – fire and wings.”

— Jean Rhys

45. “Justice’, she said. ‘I’ve heard that word. It’s a cold word. I tried it out’, she said, still speaking in a low voice. ‘I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.”

— Jean Rhys

46. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

47. “I will write my name in fire red.”

— Jean Rhys

48. “I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.”

— Jean Rhys

49. “One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.”

— Jean Rhys

50. “Your husband certainly love money,′ she said. ‘That is no lie Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can’t see nothing else.”

— Jean Rhys