Top 120 Jean Rhys Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Unhappily children do hurt flies.”

— Jean Rhys

102. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

103. “All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.”

— Jean Rhys

104. “These people all fling themselves at me. Because I am uneasy and sad they all fling themselves at me larger than life. But I can put my arm up to avoid the impact and they slide gently to the ground. Individualists, completely wrapped up in themselves, thank God. It’s the extrovert, prancing around, dying for a bit of fun – that’s the person you’ve got to be wary of.”

— Jean Rhys

105. “I had had the job for three weeks. It was dreary. You couldn’t read; they didn’t like it. I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart – all complete.”

— Jean Rhys

106. “What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.”

— Jean Rhys

107. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

108. “I have arranged my little life.”

— Jean Rhys

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

— Jean Rhys

110. “May you tear each other to bits, you damned hyenas, and the quicker the better. Let it be destroyed. Let it happen. Let it end, this cold insanity.”

— Jean Rhys

111. “And then the days came when I was alone.”

— Jean Rhys

112. “I hope that gay gentleman will be safe.”

— Jean Rhys

113. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

114. “Of course, as soon as a thing has happened it isn’t fantastic any longer, it’s inevitable. The inevitable is what you’re doing or have done. The fantastic is simply what you didn’t do.”

— Jean Rhys

115. “The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.”

— Jean Rhys

116. “Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself.”

— Jean Rhys

117. “Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan – or so he made her believe.”

— Jean Rhys

118. “I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.”

— Jean Rhys

119. “Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.”

— Jean Rhys

120. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

121. “Well, that was the end of me, the real end. Two pound ten every Tuesday and a room of the Gray’s Inn Road. Saved, rescued and with my place to hide in – what more did I want? I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang. Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only – to be left alone. No more pawings, no more pryings – leave me alone.”

— Jean Rhys

122. “There is no control over memory.”

— Jean Rhys

123. “But they left their treasure, gold and more gold. Some of it is found- but the finders never tell, because you see they’d only get one-third then: that’s the law of treasure. They want it all, so never speak of it.”

— Jean Rhys

124. “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.”

— Jean Rhys

125. “Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.”

— Jean Rhys

126. “The really important difficulty is the place, room, cave, cabin to write in. – Jean Rhys.”

— Jean Rhys

127. “A vague procession of towns all exactly alike, a vague procession of men also exactly alike. One can drift like that for a long time, she found, carefully hiding the fact that this wasn’t what one had expected of life. Not in the very least.”

— Jean Rhys

128. “She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She don’t come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she don’t come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it’s you come all the long way to her house – it’s you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have. Now you say you don’t love her and you break her up. What you do with her money, eh?”

— Jean Rhys

129. “She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.”

— Jean Rhys

130. “If I could choose I would rather be happy than write.”

— Jean Rhys

131. “She was a shadow, kept alive by a flame of hatred for somebody who had long ago forgotten all about her.”

— Jean Rhys

132. “Anything you like; anything I like... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us.”

— Jean Rhys

133. “I stopped going out; I stopped wanting to go out. That happens very easily. It’s as if you had always done that – lived in a few rooms and gone from one to the other.”

— Jean Rhys

134. “I don’t say I don’t believe, I say I don’t know, I know what I see with my eyes and I never see it.”

— Jean Rhys

135. “The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like sunset and I knew that I would never see Coulibri again. Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses, the rocking-chairs and the blue sofa, the jasmine and the honeysuckle, and the picture of the Miller’s Daughter. When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned.”

— Jean Rhys

136. “She found pleasure in memories, as an old woman might have done.”

— Jean Rhys

137. “Well, there you are. It’s not that these things happen or even that one survives them, but what makes life strange is that they are forgotten. Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies. This is what makes life so droll – the way you forget and every day is a new day, and there’s hope for everybody, hooray...”

— Jean Rhys