All the fun and sweetness of life hurt so abominably when it was always just out of your reach.

And yet the strange thing was that she was still beautiful, as an animal would be in old age.

I'm not troubling you; you've no right to trouble me. I've as much right as you to live, haven't I?

Don't worry. Let it go like water running past you, and be as serene as you can.

Hard not to sing this to the tune "Say Hello , Wave Goodbye"

Jean Rhys@msjeanrhys.bsky.social · 5d ago

Sitting on the terrace of the Dôme, drinking Pernods and talking about sanity with enormous hollows under my eyes.

Sitting on the terrace of the Dôme, drinking Pernods and talking about sanity with enormous hollows under my eyes.

There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it.

Please try not to be so sad. Can't you think that it is the price of feeling anything at all, or living, or acting or being yourself even - it's the shadow of light as it were, this black melancholy - or - the other way round.

They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. And that's what terrifies you about them. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliché. Everything is born out of a cliché, rests on a cliché, survives by a cliché. And they believe in the clichés - there's no hope.

It's always like that with money. You never know where it goes to. You change a fiver and then it's gone.

I don't feel well. I don't feel up to it. My clothes are too shabby. Besides, I hate people. I'm afraid of people. I never used to be like this, but now I'm going dippy, I suppose.

One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out.

She was so exquisite that girl that it clutched at one, gave one pain that anything so lovely could ever grow old or die or do ugly things.

I'm bored, bored, bored! Look here. Let's go to a music-hall.

I long to be like Other People! The extraordinary, ungetatable, oddly cruel Other People accusing you of being thin-skinned, sulky, vindictive or ridiculous.

Don't trouble me now You without honour. Don't walk in my footstep You without shame.

Soon does one learn the bitter lesson that humanity is never content just to differ from you and let it go at that. Never.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We keep seeing this quote attributed to Jean Rhys. Even Michico Kakutani included it in her last book. But Jean Rhys never said or wrote it. It comes from a 1995 essay by Hazel Rochman.

Later on I learned to know that most English people kept knives under their tongues to stab me.

Drinking coffee very early in the morning, everything like a dream. I was so tired.

When I got home I rushed into my bedroom and locked the door because I knew that this book was the most important thing that had ever happened to me and I did not want anybody to be there when I looked at it. But I was very disappointed, because it was in French and seemed dull.

I hit you. And I'm jolly glad I hit you, too.

If I thought you'd kill me, I'd come away with you right now and no questions asked.

The slightest whisper goes from one end of the village to the other - and it's a big shout at the finish.

Americans are so stupid. They don't know anything, only their own literature, which isn't much.

The extrovert, prancing around, dying for a bit of fun - that's the person you've got to be wary of.

I must say Americans dream up such awful horrors.

A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that's all any room is.

‘Jean Rhys is always slightly to the edge of the canon compared to the properly enshrined perfect modernist that Woolf is. And that just sort of annoys me a bit.’ James Wood on Jean Rhys’s realism, on our Close Readings subscription podcast. Listen to an extract: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/c...

Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys

Podcast Episode · Close Readings · 25 June · 1hr 18min

podcasts.apple.com