Jean Rhys

Daily tweets from the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, Good Morning, Midnight etc. If I could choose, I would rather be happy than write.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

EDITOR'S NOTE: If you respond to one of Ms Rhys's tweets, please be aware she is very, very unlikely to reply. Because she's dead.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

I have been accused of madness. But if everything is in me, good, evil and so on, so must strength be in me if I know how to get at it.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Am too wobbly to go up to London. Stage fright again!

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Her life had been a long succession of humiliations and mistakes and pains and ridiculous efforts. Everybody's life was like that.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

The vagabond nights, the fresh mornings, the long sleepy afternoons spent behind drawn curtains.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

What with worry and whisky nothing very sensible was arranged last summer.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Venus is dead; Apollo is dead; even Jesus is dead. All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

I was a G.K. Chesterton sort of socialist, a cow and an acre of land for every man, that kind of thing.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Nobody says a thing is splendid. You never say a thing is splendid, or a person is splendid. Do you? Splendor's gone.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

I've always prided myself on being more or less indifferent to what most people thought about a book once it was finished ... If I tinker around with it I'll spoil it, without helping myself a bit, from the being popular point of view. Oh Lordy Lord.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

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

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Today I must be very careful, today I have left my armour at home.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Drink, drink their yellow horse piss, talk, talk their lying talk.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

She wondered what the old beast would say if he knew that she rather liked him.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

I will be all right. I must be. I wonder whether I'll post this?

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Oh God the stupidity, the ugliness, the darkness, the loneliness and the cruelty of this beastly little place.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

He rose, shook himself, and thus disturbed in his musings, lamented: ‘Oh, God! How I hate women who write! How I hate them!’ in an agreeable voice.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

How few people understood what a tightrope she walked or what would happen if she slipped. The abyss. Despair. All those things.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Every day is a new day. Every day you are a new person.

[Jean Rhys @MsJeanRhys]

Altogether I feel like Katherine Mansfield's fly after it was drowned the sixth time or was it the seventh?