Jean Rhys

It's funny how well you can remember when you lie in the dark with your arm over your forehead. Two eyes open inside your head.

A zombie is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead. A zombie can also be the spirit of a place, usually malignant. A zombie can take the appearance of anyone. Or anything … and that’s what I feel like!

Drown me in sleep. And soon.

The mechanism of her brain got to work with a painful jerk and begin to tick in time with the clock.

All the worst mistakes have started because out of a weak futile conceited gutless desire to please I've done something I didn't want to do.

I don't mind about being laughed at any more. Isn't it funny? Probably I'm being hated instead.

She was irresponsible. She had fits of melancholy when she would lose the self-control necessary to keep up appearances.

Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like - like Rasputin.

Planning it all out. Eating. A movie. Eating again. One drink. A long walk back to the hotel. Bed. Luminal. Sleep. Just sleep - no dreams.

My will is quite weakened because I drink too much but even this lunatic writing is better than the blank blank days.

I usually dislike my books, sometimes don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better.

I don't mind about being laughed at any more. Isn't it funny? Probably I'm being hated instead.

For the attention of @msjeanrhys.bsky.social

I had started out in life trusting everyone and now I trusted no one. So I had few acquaintances and no close friends.

I don't give a damn for my idiotic body of a woman, anyway. And all the people who yap.

Because she was outside the machine they might come along any time with a pair of huge iron tongs and pick her up and put her on the rubbish heap, and there she would lie and rot.

I must say Americans dream up such awful horrors.

There was a man standing on a box, bawling something about God. Nobody was listening to him. You could only hear ‘God…. God…. The wrath of God…. Wah, wah, wah, wah …’

The "Paris" all these people write about, Henry Miller, even Hemingway etc was not "Paris" at all - it was "America in Paris". The real Paris had nothing to do with that lot - As soon as the tourists came the real Montparnos packed up and left.

He might be right. On the other hand, he might just possibly be wrong. But it didn't really matter much.

'Cheer up,' he said. 'The world is big. There's hope.'
'Of course.' But suddenly I saw the women's long, scowling faces over their lupins and their poppies, and my room in Torrington Square and the iron bars of my bedstead, and I thought, 'Not for me.'

All this I saw and heard in a fraction of a second. And the sky so red. Someone screamed and I thought, Why did I scream? I called ‘Tia!’ and jumped and woke.

I am utterly completely and for ever Fed UP with the country.

Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it.

Oh, God, I'm only twenty and I'll have to go on living and living and living.

She talked about books till I wanted to scream - or say Merde or something. I agreed with everything she said God help me - and was miserable all next day.

I can be silent too, and behave nicely though that's a strain.

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.

Some old people are lonely. But a great many others live in dread of being argued with, persuaded or even forced to do something which they know will be catastrophic.

Persecution maniacs (so called) always have been, and usually still are, the victims of persecution.