Daphne Du Maurier Quotes

#1. Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

Craig Venter

#2. I did not have an unlimited library to choose from on Robben Island. We had access to many unremembered mysteries and detective novels and all the works of Daphne du Maurier, but little more.

Nelson Mandela

#3. My first six books were horror, I think because when I was young I loved Stephen King. John Wyndham, Daphne Du Maurier, and it's natural to try and emulate the books you first loved.

Sarah Pinborough

#4. Watch that boy. He's going to startle somebody someday.

Daphne Du Maurier

#5. The air was full of their scent, sweet and heady, and it seemed to me as though their very essence had mingled with the running waters of the stream, and become one with the falling rain and the dank rich moss beneath our fee

Daphne Du Maurier

#6. Truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.

Daphne Du Maurier

#7. The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

Daphne Du Maurier

#8. You have blotted out the past for me, you know, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo. But for you I should have left long ago, gone to Italy, and Greece, and further still perhaps. You have spared me all those wanderings.

Daphne Du Maurier

#9. For love, as she knew it now, was something without shame and without reserve, the possession of two people who had no barrier between them, and no pride; whatever happened to him would happen to her too, all feeling, all movement, all sensation of body and of mind.

Daphne Du Maurier

#10. This car had the wings of Mercury, I thought, for higher yet we climbed, and dangerously fast, and the danger pleased me because it was new to me, because I was young.

Daphne Du Maurier

#11. From the very first, I knew that it would be so ... I smiled to myself, and said, That
and none other.

Daphne Du Maurier

#12. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.

Daphne Du Maurier

#13. Of course we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us.

Daphne Du Maurier

#14. When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter of a woman's hurrying footsteps, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled shoe.

Daphne Du Maurier

#15. I had never looked more youthful, I had never felt so old.

Daphne Du Maurier

#16. There was nothing quite so shaming, so degrading as a marriage that had failed.

Daphne Du Maurier

#17. What degradation lay in being young.

Daphne Du Maurier

#18. He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this.
from a Difference in Temperament

Daphne Du Maurier

#19. I would have gone too but I wanted to come straight back to you.I kept thinking of you, waiting here, all by yourself, not knowing what was going to happen.

Daphne Du Maurier

#20. Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.

Daphne Du Maurier

#21. You're all wounded and hurt and torn inside.

Daphne Du Maurier

#22. There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.

Daphne Du Maurier

#23. Contentment is a state of mind and body when the two work in harmony, and there is no friction. The mind is at peace, and the body also. The two are sufficient to themselves. Happiness is elusive
coming perhaps once in a life-time
and approaching ectasy.

Daphne Du Maurier

#24. the rank and melancholy smell of charred wet wood and sodden leaves coming towards me on a wisp of air.

Daphne Du Maurier

#25. He looked down at me without recognition, and I realized with a little stab of anxiety that he must have forgotten all about me, perhaps for some considerable time, and that he himself was so lost in the labyrinth of his own unquiet thoughts that I did not exist.

Daphne Du Maurier

#26. Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.

Daphne Du Maurier

#27. [Referring to the birds:] Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

Daphne Du Maurier

#28. And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.

Daphne Du Maurier

#29. There are some women, Philip, good women very possibly, who through no fault of their own impel disaster. Whatever they touch, somehow turns to tragedy.

Daphne Du Maurier

#30. An empty house can be as lonely as a full hotel" he said at length."The trouble is that it is less impersonal.

Daphne Du Maurier

#31. The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.

Daphne Du Maurier

#32. I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.

Daphne Du Maurier

#33. If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.

Daphne Du Maurier

#34. The routine of life goes on, whatever happens, we do the same things, go through the little performance of eating, sleeping, washing. No crisis can break through the crust of habit.

Daphne Du Maurier

#35. Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

Daphne Du Maurier

#36. Little notes, scrawled on half-sheets of paper, and letters, when he was away, page after page, intimate, their news. Her voice, echoing through the house, and down the garden, careless and familiar like the writing in the book.
And I had to call him Maxim.

Daphne Du Maurier

#37. I scanned the criticisms of recent books to see if there were any that resembled mine. I resented them all; it seemed to me too many people wrote in England, too many people had ideas.

Daphne Du Maurier

#38. No person will ever get into my blood as a place can ... People and things pass away, but not places.

Daphne Du Maurier

#39. She laughed because she must, and because he made her;

Daphne Du Maurier

#40. You know,' she said, 'it's a good thing, now and again, to take stock of oneself in life. To see where one has gone wrong. I

Daphne Du Maurier

#41. What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you?

Daphne Du Maurier

#42. If it must be so, let's not weep nor complain If I have failed, or you, or life turned sullen. We have had these things, they do not come again, But the flag still flies and the city has not fallen." Humbert Wolfe

Daphne Du Maurier

#43. I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.

Daphne Du Maurier

#44. It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.

Daphne Du Maurier

#45. The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.

Daphne Du Maurier

#46. Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.

Daphne Du Maurier

#47. I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album. Those roof-tops and that sea were mine no more. They belonged to yesterday, to the past.

Daphne Du Maurier

#48. Come and see us if you feel like it,' she said. 'I always expect people to ask themselves. Life is too short to send out invitations.

Daphne Du Maurier

#49. When she smiled it was as though she embraced the world.

Daphne Du Maurier

#50. Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.

Daphne Du Maurier

#51. Her dullness made her own punishment.

Daphne Du Maurier

#52. Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.

Daphne Du Maurier

#53. You have only to look at his eyes. He's still in hell...

Daphne Du Maurier

#54. Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding.

Daphne Du Maurier

#55. He lacked tenderness; he was rude; and he had more than a streak of cruelty in him; he was a thief and a liar. He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him ... This was no choice made with the mind.

Daphne Du Maurier

#56. The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.

Daphne Du Maurier

#57. This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

Daphne Du Maurier

#58. One of my favorite first sentences of a
book is from Rebecca, Last night I dreamt
I went to Manderley again.

Daphne Du Maurier

#59. He stole horses' you'll say to yourself, 'and he didn't care for women; and but for my pride I'd have been with him now.

Daphne Du Maurier

#60. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

Daphne Du Maurier

#61. The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.

Daphne Du Maurier

#62. And this then, that I am feeling now, is the hell that comes with love, the hell and the damnation and the agony beyond all enduring, because after the beauty and the loveliness comes the sorrow and the pain.

Daphne Du Maurier

#63. It was disturbing, like an enchanted place. I had not thought it could be as beautiful as this

Daphne Du Maurier

#64. Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession any more. It was something to be traded, bought and sold. It fetched a high price, or a low one. It was kicked in the common market.

Daphne Du Maurier

#65. Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

Daphne Du Maurier

#66. And perhaps one day, in after years, someone would wander there and listen to the silence, as she had done, and catch the whisper of the dreams that she had dreamt there, in midsummer, under the hot sun and the white sky.

Daphne Du Maurier

#67. Did you never try," I asked, "to make some life of happiness?"
"Happiness was not in question," he said; "that went with you, a factor you refused to recognise.

Daphne Du Maurier

#68. She's dearer than life itself, that's all I know.

Daphne Du Maurier

#69. I know that age, it's a particularly obstinate one, and a thousand bogies won't make you fear the future. A pity we can't change over.

Daphne Du Maurier

#70. Why this man should love that woman, what queer chemical mix-up in our blood draws us to one another, who can tell?

Daphne Du Maurier

#71. I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people.

Daphne Du Maurier

#72. I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.

Daphne Du Maurier

#73. She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die ... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.

Daphne Du Maurier

#74. And through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace.

Daphne Du Maurier

#75. She would have stood by Giles's side, and shaken hands with people, a smile on her face. I could not do that. I had not the pride, I had not the guts. I was badly bred.

Daphne Du Maurier

#76. She knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live.

Daphne Du Maurier

#77. reader is back in the

Daphne Du Maurier

#78. I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.' 'You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.' 'For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five.

Daphne Du Maurier

#79. It was unlike anything I had ever known. I had no feeling, no pain.

Daphne Du Maurier

#80. He was my secret property. Preserved for me alone...

Daphne Du Maurier

#81. He's made his own hell and there's no one but himself to thank for it.

Daphne Du Maurier

#82. Nat thought to himself that "they" were no doubt considering the problem at that very moment, but whatever "they" decided to do in London and the big cities would not help the people here, three hundred miles away. Each householder must look after his own.

Daphne Du Maurier

#83. Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what-has-been, the suffering, the joy?

Daphne Du Maurier

#84. We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.

Daphne Du Maurier

#85. A bad workman blames his tools.

Daphne Du Maurier

#86. F we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.

Daphne Du Maurier

#87. She had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.

Daphne Du Maurier

#88. And, though there should be a world of difference between the smile of a man and the bared fangs of a wolf, with Joss Merlyn they were one and the same.

Daphne Du Maurier

#89. You see,' she said, snapping the top, and walking down the stairs, 'you are so very different from Rebecca

Daphne Du Maurier

#90. We've got a bond in common, you and I. We are both alone in the world.

Daphne Du Maurier

#91. ... you guessed that somewhere, in heaven knew what country and what guise, there was someone who was part of your body and your brain, and that without him you were lost, a straw blown by the wind.

Daphne Du Maurier

#92. If there's one thing that makes a man sick, it's to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand.

Daphne Du Maurier

#93. A pleasantly situated hotel close to the sea, and chalets by the water's edge where one breakfasted. Clientele well-to-do, and although I count myself no snob I cannot abide paper bags and orange peel. ("Not After Midnight")

Daphne Du Maurier

#94. Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.

Daphne Du Maurier

#95. All autobiography is self-indulgent.

Daphne Du Maurier

#96. Resignation brings its own reward

Daphne Du Maurier

#97. There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair

Daphne Du Maurier

#98. I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.

Daphne Du Maurier

#99. It doesn't make for sanity, does it, living with the devil.

Daphne Du Maurier

#100. The relief was tremendous. I did not feel sick anymore. The pain had gone...I had no idea I was so empty.

Daphne Du Maurier