Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?

— Jean Rhys

Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.

— Jean Rhys

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.

— Jean Rhys

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

— Jean Rhys

I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.

— Jean Rhys

I am the only real truth I know.

— Jean Rhys

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

I had started out in life trusting everyone, and now I trusted no one. So I had a few acquaintances and no close friends. It was perhaps in reaction against the inevitable loneliness of my life that I'd find myself doing bold, risky, even outrageous things without hesitation or surprise. I was usually disappointed in these adventures, and they didn't have much effect on me, good or bad, but I never quite lost the hope of something better or different.

— Jean Rhys

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

— Jean Rhys

Is it true,’ she said, ‘that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.’‘Well’, I answered annoyed, ‘that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.’‘But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?’‘And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?’‘More easily,’ she said, ‘much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.

— Jean Rhys