Wide Sargasso Sea Quotes

She said 'darling' with her lips, but her heart was dead. (chapter 5)

...What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. ("Till September Petronella")

She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul. (chapter 12)

When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy. 'Do you think think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.

So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)

...there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace ("Outside the Machine")

Very few people change after well say seven or seventeen. Not really. They get more this or more that and of course look a bit different. But inside they are the same. (1955)

He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed.
'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)...

'Mein Lieb, Mon Cher, My Dear, Amigo,' the letter began (beginning of the story "Tigers Are Better-looking")

I think that the Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable. You come and have a look out of curiosity and then allow the freak to see what you think of her. It's only done to the more or less unsuccessful and only by Anglo-Saxons. Well... if it were my last breath I'd say HELL TO IT and to the people who do it- (1936)

I've noticed that. They believe the lies far more than they believe the truth.

"It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)

The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult.