Wide Sargasso Sea Quotes

Everyone does seem very pessimistic about the future of writing and art in general. But hasn't it always been a fight? I remember how very bitter most of the English in Paris were about that very subject ages ago. (1953)

One is born either to go with or to go against.

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)

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)

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

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.

Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches. I was looking at it two feet deep on the flat roof outside my bedroom. The ash and the silence. Nobody talked in the street, nobody talked while we ate, or hardly at all. I know now that they were all frightened. They thought our volcano was going up. (beginning of "Heat")

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