Jean Rhys

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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