Home > Work > After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
1 " Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living. "
― Jean Rhys , After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
2 " 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. "
3 " It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong. "
4 " It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe. "
5 " The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? "
6 " If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it. "
7 " He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people. "
8 " Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed. "
9 " ...morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness. "
10 " The rumble of the life outside was like the sound of the sea which was rising gradually around her. "
11 " She was a shadow, kept alive by a flame of hatred for somebody who had long ago forgotten all about her. "
12 " You surpise me, because people nearly always force you to ask, don't they? "
13 " She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one. "
14 " What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both. "
15 " I wanted it-like iron. "
16 " There was a vase of flame-coloured tulips in the hall - surely the most graceful of flowers. Some thrust their heads forward like snakes, and some were very erect, stiff, virginal, rather prim. Some were dying, with curved grace in their death. "
17 " She was certainly rather drunk. Her eyes were fixed as if upon some far-off point. 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. "
18 " An anxious expression spread over his face as he thought to himself that the time was coming when he would have to give up this comfort, and then that comfort, until God knew what would be the end of it all. In this way he was an imaginative man, and when these fits of foreboding overcame him he genuinely forgot that only a succession of highly improbable catastrophes could reduce him to the penury he so feared. "
19 " She found pleasure in memories, as an old woman might have done. "
20 " She had a sweet voice, a voice with a warm and tender quality. This was strange, because her face was cold, as though warmth and tenderness were dead in her. "
