You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.
Jean RhysRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses deep feelings of loss and longing for a loved one, reflecting on the complexity of love and death.
In this poignant reflection, Jean Rhys articulates the repeated experience of watching a loved one suffer and ultimately die, emphasizing the emotional weight of love intertwined with loss. The imagery of light—sunlight, moonlight, and candlelight—symbolizes both presence and absence, suggesting that even as they shared moments of intimacy, the impending loss loomed large, echoing the profound impact of love that transforms into sorrow.
Themes
LoveLossGriefIntimacyMemory
In practice
Example use cases
In a eulogy for a loved one, to express the depth of shared experiences.
More from Jean Rhys
All quotes →If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
Jean RhysRead
The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.
Jean RhysRead
Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad.
Jean RhysRead
My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.
Jean RhysRead
I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.
Jean RhysRead
Similar quotes
Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman's toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace.
Marianne WilliamsonRead
She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.
Zora Neale HurstonRead
The command is to love him, not just to think about him, or do things for him. We are not to stop with a proper legal relationship - for example, to think of a man as legally lost, which he is, in the sight of a holy God - without thinking of him as a person. Saying this, we can suddenly see that much evangelism is not only sub-Christian, but subhuman - legalistic and impersonal.
Francis SchaefferRead
For we love not God first, to compel him to love again; but he loved us first, and gave his Son for us, that we might see love and love again, saith St John in his first epistle.
William TyndaleRead
Keep your heart open for as long as you can, as wide as you can, for others and especially for yourself.
Morrie SchwartzRead
It is not night when I do see your face, Therefore I think I am not in the night; Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company, For you in my respect are all the world: Then how can it be said I am alone, When all the world is here to look on me?
William ShakespeareRead