Wide Sargasso Sea Quotes

I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this.
This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . .

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

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion. ("The Insect World")

One October afternoon Mrs Baker was having tea with Miss Verney and talking about the proposed broiler factory in the middle of the village where they both lived. Miss Verney, who had not been listening attentively, said, 'You know Letty, I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.' (beginning of the story "Sleep It Off, Lady")

It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. (first lines of Part One)

'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?'
There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in flight of steps. What they call an impasse.
I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life.

There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father's pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It's in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel. (beginning of "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds")

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

(How much in your books comes from personal experience?) RHYS: If you experience a thing you know you can write it so much more, but life's one thing, a book's another.

She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'.

I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day. (Part One, 7th section)

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

You see I don't even know myself and am really trying to argue it out with myself - anyway it isn't very important. (1934)

I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing.