Jean Rhys

Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set... Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters, Jean Rhys's semi-autobiographical portrayal of a young woman's sexual encounters is a searingly honest exploration of loneliness and yearning. Ten new titles in the colourful, small-format, portable new Pocket Penguins series

Good Morning, Midnight

akshita

But never tell the truth about this business of rooms, otherwise it would bust the roof of everything and undermine the whole social system.

All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair and perhaps a bidet. 

A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that's all any room is. Why should I worry about changing my room?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

If you're determined to get people on the cheap, you shouldn't be so surprised when they pitch you their own little story of misery sometimes.

As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. 

When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you.

"West African masks?" "Yes, straight from the Congo...I made them."

He takes it down and shows it to me. The close set eye holes stare into mine. I know that face very well; I've seen lots like it, complete with legs and body.

Sarah Christine Gill

Well, we go into the Café Buffalo. Will I have a little apéritif? I certainly will. Two Pernods arrive. 

I start thinking about food. Choucroute, for instance - you ought to be able to get choucroute garnie here. Lovely sausage, lovely potato, lovely, lovely cabbage... My mouth starts watering violently. I drink half the glass of Pernod in order to swallow convenablement. And then I feel like a goddess. It might have made me sick, but it has done the other thing 

And did I mind? Not at all, not at all. If you think I minded, then youve never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets. Close-up of human nature- isn't it worth something? 

Next morning we eat an enormous breakfast of sausages, cold meat, cheese and milk. We walk about Amsterdam. We look at pictures in the Rijksmuseum. "Would you like to see your double? Enno says. 

I am tuned up to top pitch. Everything is smooth, soft and tender. Making love. The colours of the pictures. The sunsets. Tender, north colours when the sun sets - pink, mauve, green and blue. And the wind very fresh and cold and the lights in the canals like gold caterpillars and the seagulls swooping over the water. Tuned up to top pitch. Everything tender and melancholy - as life is sometimes, just for one moment. 

The curtains are thin, and when they are drawn the light comes through softly. There are flowers on the window-sill and I can see their shadows on the curtains. The child downstairs is screaming. 

There is a wind, and the flowers on the window-sill, and their shadows on the curtains, are waving. Like swans dipping their beaks in water. Like the incalculable raising its head, use- lessly and wildly, for one moment before it sinks down, into the darkness. Like skulls on long, thin necks. Plunging wildly when the wind blows, to the end of the curtain, which is their noth- ingness. Distorting themselves as they plunge. 

The musty smell, the bugs, the loneliness, this room, which is part of the street outside - this is all I want from life. 

Stas

l am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail trunks of the trees and the thin, frail ghosts in my room. ‘La tristesse vaut mieux que la joie.’

Good Morning, Midnight quotes

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