LovingJeanRhys

[lovingjeanrhys]

“A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.”—Good Morning, Midnight

[wordsthat-speak]

“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.”

— Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (Jean Rhys)

[floorb0ards]

“When a writer like Joyce or Eliot writes about an alienated man estranged from himself, he is read as a portrait of the diminished possibilities of human existence in modern society. When Rhys writes about an alienated woman estranged from herself, critics applaud her perceptive but narrow depiction of female experience and tend to narrow her vision even further by labelling it both pathological and autobiographical.”

— Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Good Morning, Midnight: Good Night, Modernism”

[goodquoteco]

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

— Jean Rhys

[thefoxhuntingman]

“Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers.”

— Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

[lovingjeanrhys]

“I’m not at all for women’s lib. I don’t dislike women exactly, but I don’t trust them. You can never tell them what you really think, because if they know what you think they’ll do you down. I’m not, I’ve never been intimate with them. It’s not worth it.”—Jean Rhys in conversation with David Plante

[lovingjeanrhys]

“When I was excited about life, I didn’t want to write at all.”—Jean Rhys

[lovingjeanrhys]

an ad for Jean Rhys’s perfume

[lovingjeanrhys]

“I imagined myself saying very calmly, ‘The thing is that you don’t understand. You think I want more than I do. I only want to see you sometimes, but if I never see you again I’ll die. I’m dying now really, and I’m too young to die.’”

[lovingjeanrhys]

From The Sunday Times, February 1973

[lovingjeanrhys]

Ford must have had a great...personality?

[lovingjeanrhys]

“Reading [Rhys], we understand that we deceive ourselves when we hope that the powerless are not despised and pushed aside.”—Diana Athill, London, 1986