Wide Sargasso Sea Quotes

It's a lovely feeling to know you can do exactly as you like.

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")

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.)...

I usually dislike my books, sometimes, don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better. I am always excited and forget all failures and all else. (1953)

The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)

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)

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

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

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)

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)

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

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.

I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line by line. (1953)

When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. (chapter 6)

...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)