“[Jean Rhys] loves receiving letters, but does not like talking over the telephone. She always answers letters from friends. / She doesn’t gossip about her friends, and if you say something a little critical of a mutual friend she frowns as if she cannot imagine how you can be a friend of someone and be critical of him. / Any criticism—or even anger—she might have towards an individual friend comes out as an angry criticism of a generalized ‘them’.”

“But when I think ‘tomorrow’ there is a gap in my head, a blank – as if I were falling through emptiness. Tomorrow never comes.”

“This is a game—a game played in the snow for a worthless prize.”

“And did I mind? Not at all, not at all. If you think I minded, then you’ve never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets.”

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

(Source: ykantdinoread)

“Of course, you get used to things, you get used to anything. It was as if I had always lived like that. Only sometimes, when I had got back home and was undressing to go to bed, I would think, ‘My God, this is a funny way to live. My God, how did this happen?’”

“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.”

“All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms have these eyes - others have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful. But the grey sky, which is the background, terrifies me….And the arms wave to the accompaniment of music and of song. Like this: ‘Hotcha - hotcha - hotcha….’ And I know the music; I can sing the song.”

(Source: 19841979)

“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.”

(Source: 19841979)

“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. That goes for everybody.”

“People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer whether you live or die. You only get there after a long time and many misfortunes. And do you think you are left there? Never.
As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you.”

“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.”

(Source: jessicabrokaw, via 19841979)

“Then she had got up and looked at herself in the glass. She had let her nightgown slip down off her shoulders, and had a look at herself. She was tall and straight and slim and young - well, fairly young. She had taken up a strand of her hair and put her face against it and thought how she liked the smell and the feel of it. She had laughed at herself in the glass and her teeth were white and sound and even. Yes, she had laughed at herself in the glass. Like an idiot.
Then in the midst of her laughter she had noticed how pale her lips were; and she had thought: ‘My life’s like death. It’s like being buried alive. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.’
She could not stop crying. It had been as if something terribly strong were struggling within her, and tearing her in its struggles. And then she had thought: ‘If this goes on for another year I’m finished. I’ll be old and finished, and that’s that.
Of course, she had thought that sort of thing before. But always vaguely - and there had not been anything vague about the way she had thought last night.”

(Source: saltandsugarsearching)

“Not to think. Only to watch the branches of that tree and the pattern they make standing out against a cold sky. Above all, not to think.”

(Source: saltandsugarsearching)