Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.”

— Daphne du Maurier

Featured in: Happiness Quotes, Emotion Quotes, Mind Quotes

2. “A bad workman blames his tools.”

— Daphne du Maurier

3. “But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”

— Daphne du Maurier

4. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

5. “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

6. “There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.”

— Daphne du Maurier

7. “Dead men tell no tales, Mary.”

— Daphne du Maurier

8. “Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear.”

— Daphne du Maurier

9. “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

10. “A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.”

— Daphne du Maurier

11. “I had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.”

— Daphne du Maurier

12. “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

13. “Why, he wondered, should he remember her suddenly, on such a day, watching the rain falling on the apple trees?”

— Daphne du Maurier

14. “I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”

— Daphne du Maurier

15. “Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”

— Daphne du Maurier

16. “When she smiled it was as though she embraced the world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

17. “Happiness happens when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.”

— Daphne du Maurier

18. “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

19. “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

20. “When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.”

— Daphne du Maurier

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

21. “What might have been – what could have been. These are the saddest phrases in our English tongue.”

— Daphne du Maurier

22. “Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.”

— Daphne du Maurier

23. “I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

24. “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

25. “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

26. “I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.”

— Daphne du Maurier

27. “Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.”

— Daphne du Maurier

28. “We’re not meant for happiness, you and I.”

— Daphne du Maurier

29. “If you think I’m one of those people who try to be funny at breakfast you’re wrong. I’m invariably ill-tempered in the early morning.”

— Daphne du Maurier

30. “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

31. “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

32. “I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.”

— Daphne du Maurier

33. “Life and death do not wait for legal action.”

— Daphne du Maurier

34. “Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

35. “I have no talent for making new friends, but oh such genius for fidelity to old ones.”

— Daphne du Maurier

36. “Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.”

— Daphne du Maurier

37. “I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.”

— Daphne du Maurier

38. “We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before.”

— Daphne du Maurier

39. “And I don’t like books which are full of name dropping.”

— Daphne du Maurier

40. “When people suffer a great shock, like death, or the loss of a limb, I believe they don’t feel it just at first. If your hand is taken from you you don’t know, for a few minutes, that your hand is gone. You go on feeling the fingers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

41. “Disliking our fellow men, we craved affection; but shyness kept impulse dormant until the heart was touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

42. “I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire.”

— Daphne du Maurier

43. “You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.”

— Daphne du Maurier

44. “Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?”

— Daphne du Maurier

45. “We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.”

— Daphne du Maurier

46. “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

47. “We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.”

— Daphne du Maurier

48. “I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.”

— Daphne du Maurier

49. “It wouldn’t make for sanity would it, living with the devil.”

— Daphne du Maurier

50. “No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.”

— Daphne du Maurier

Featured in: Romance Quotes