Quotes from Wide Sargasso Sea

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world...”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“Blot out the moon,
Pull down the stars.
Love in the dark, for we're for the dark
So soon, so soon.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“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 to me. There is no justice.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“There is always another side, always.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“As soon as I turned the key I saw it hanging, the color of fire and sunset. the colour of flamboyant flowers. ‘If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, ‘ I said, ‘your soul is lifted up when it flowers. Everyone wants that.’

She shook her head but she did not move or touch me.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.

But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“I have been too unhappy, I thought, it cannot last, being so unhappy, it would kill you”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“If she says goodbye perhaps adieu. Adieu - like those old time songs she sang. Always adieu (and all songs say it). If she too says it, or weeps, I'll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She's mad but mine, mine. What will I care for gods or devils or for Fate itself. If she smiles or weeps or both. For me.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“I have tried," I said, "but he does not believe me. It is too late for that now" (it is always too late for truth, I thought).”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“It is the tragedy of a distinguished mind and a generous nature that have gone unappreciated in a conventional, unimaginative world. A victim of men's incomprehension of women, a symptom of women's mistrust of men.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“I took the red dress down and put it against myself. 'Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?' I said.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“I thought if I told no one it might not be true.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don't know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset...Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses...When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ...”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“If this is a sad story, don’t tell it to me tonight.’‘It is not sad,’ she said. ‘Only some things happen and are there for always even though you forget why or when.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

“When you insult or injure the unfortunate or the unhappy, you insult Christ Himself and He will not forget, for they are His chosen ones.”
― Jean Rhys, quote from Wide Sargasso Sea

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Popular quotes

“I want to weep, she thought. I want to be comforted. I’m so tired of being strong. I want to be foolish and frightened for once. Just for a small while, that’s all …a day … an hour ...
...One day, she promised herself as she lay abed, one day she would allow herself to be less than strong.
But not today. It could not be today.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Clash of Kings

“I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the”
― Scott O'Dell, quote from Island of the Blue Dolphins

“He's an honest politician--he stays bought.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Stranger in a Strange Land

“If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I keep forgetting that rules are only for little nice people.”
― Bill Watterson, quote from The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

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