Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “But once a woman stole the initiative, plundered the perquisites and took the lead, what happened to the globe? The fabric cracked.”

— Daphne du Maurier

452. “I’d be no use in a town,” said Mary. “I’ve never known anything but this life by the river, and I don’t want to. Going into Helston is town enough for me. I’m best here, with the few chickens that’s left to us, and the green stuff in the garden, and the old pig, and a bit of a boat on the river. What would I do up to Bodmin with my Aunt Patience?”

— Daphne du Maurier

453. “She put back the receiver and lifted it again. She asked for the number of Niall’s room at the theater. She went on ringing. And surely, she thought with sudden hopelessness and a new kind of dead despair, they can’t both be out and away, now at this minute in my life, when I need both of them so much? Surely one of them will come, surely one of them will help me? Because I don’t want to go home alone. I don’t want to be in the house alone, without Pappy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

454. “It seemed to Jennifer that she had sat in the cellar from the beginning of things, that never, since she could remember, had there been anything in her life but this. One day, so she was told, it would be ended. One day there would be no war.”

— Daphne du Maurier

455. “The restlessness has gone, the indecision and also the great heights of exultation, the strange depths of desolation. I am secure now, and certain of myself. There is peace and contentment.”

— Daphne du Maurier

456. “But the people enjoy watching the dog,” he said swiftly, trying to divert Charles. “That’s why they go to the circus, for distraction. Maria supplies the same drug in the theater, and I give it in large doses to all the errand-boys who whistle my songs. I think you’ve got hold of the wrong word. We’re pedlars, hawking our wares – not parasites.”

— Daphne du Maurier

457. “You don’t flatter yourself he’s in love with you, do you? He’s lonely, he can’t bear that great empty house,” was the sanest, most truthful statement she had ever made in her life.”

— Daphne du Maurier

458. “People always gossiped about us, even as children. We created a strange sort of hostility wherever we went. In those days, during and after the First World War, when other children were well-mannered and conventional, we were ill-disciplined and wild. Those dreadful Delaneys.”

— Daphne du Maurier

459. “Mary shook her head. ‘I’ve only seen the evil,’ she said; ‘I’ve only seen the suffering there’s been, and the cruelty, and the pain. When my uncle came to Jamaica Inn he must have cast his shadow over the good things, and they died.”

— Daphne du Maurier

460. “I wished he were less remote; and I anything but the creature that I was in my shabby coat and skirt, my broad-brimmed schoolgirl hat.”

— Daphne du Maurier

461. “He had no answer to that, or to any of her thoughts, and the smile that hovered a moment at the corner of her mouth and went as swiftly – it happened now, in her pretence of sleep – had no connection with him, or with his feelings, or with their life together. It was remote, the smile of someone he had never known.”

— Daphne du Maurier

462. “They’ve been drinking too,” said Pappy, examining the tooth-glass. “Cognac, judging by the smell. I never knew my daughter drank.” “She doesn’t,” said Celia, smoothing Pappy’s bed. “She always has orangeade. Unless it’s a first night, when she has champagne.” “Then it must be Niall,” said Pappy. “Someone – and who can it be but Niall? – has been pouring cognac into my tooth-glass. I shall attack Freada. Freada is responsible.” He filled the tooth-glass with cognac for himself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

463. “A mock trial was set in motion, and the mayor Montlibert forced to interrogate the prisoners. It was obvious, even to someone like myself who knew nothing of the law, that none of the men had done wrong. No arms had been found in the house. The men had no pretensions to being aristocrats. Monsieur Villette, who had presided over the proceedings in the church, spoke up in their defense.”

— Daphne du Maurier

464. “You know, when I die, the money goes to Ellen,’ she told Louis one day, and he had not said much; he looked rather vague, as though money was something he never touched; but a week or so later Ellen came into the room very flushed and excited and said that Louis-Mathurin had proposed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

465. “When he is irritable she will soothe him. When he is tired she will rest him. When he is gay she will join in his gaiety, and when he is solemn she will be solemn too.”

— Daphne du Maurier

466. “Dust unto dust. There was no reason then for life – it was only a fraction of a moment between birth and death, a movement upon the surface of water, and then it was still. Janet had loved and suffered, she had known beauty and pain, and now she was finished – blotted by the heedless earth, to be no more than a few dull letters on a stone. Joseph.”

— Daphne du Maurier

467. “Was it true the lovely part of love only lasted a moment and the sorrow went on for a lifetime?”

— Daphne du Maurier

468. “You have a very lovely and unusual name.”

— Daphne du Maurier

469. “I had only one plan, which was to finish the book, and Jennifer was turning out to be a hard-headed young woman, quite different from how I had intended her. This must surely mean I had no control over my characters.”

— Daphne du Maurier

470. “In the afternoon I begin writing a book, it is called The Alternative. It is fun writing it.’ The Alternative, like John, in the Wood of the World, leaves a total blank in memory. Possibly, like many a work of genius, it never got beyond the first page!”

— Daphne du Maurier

471. “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

— Daphne du Maurier

472. “No, Robert did not understand. Handsome, gay, debonair, perfectly self-possessed, he had yet not grasped the fact that his young sister, with her smattering of education and her provincial dress, belonged to a world that he had long left behind him, a world which, despite its apparent backwardness and rustic simplicity, had greater depth than his.”

— Daphne du Maurier

473. “I had never had the courage to demand the truth.”

— Daphne du Maurier

474. “He was not staring at her anymore. He was still. He had gone. The moment of truth had vanished forever, and she would never know. What had happened was Then, was already past, in some other dimension of time, and the present was Now, part of a future he could not share. This present, this future, was all blank to him, like the empty spaces in the photograph album beside the bed, waiting to be filled. Even, she thought, if he had read my mind, which he often did, he would not have cared.”

— Daphne du Maurier

475. “Not a single well-known personality, I shall tell the management they must make a reduction on my bill. What do they think I come here for? To look at the page boys?”

— Daphne du Maurier

476. “I sat with my hands in my lap ready to agree with what anybody said.”

— Daphne du Maurier

477. “Ellen suddenly discovered how lonely she had been before he had become her companion, and how wasted those hours had been when she had sat alone with her harp, or brooding over her books. And then, no man had shown an interest in her before, or desired to talk to her. They came to the house to be amused by her mother; the plain daughter did not entertain them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

478. “Living alone in Paris was very different from living in his own home with his family. In the old days there had been the familiar routine of day by day – meals at regular hours, the companionship of his schoolfellows, all the normal bustle of a happy, monotonous existence. Now he was a friendless young man, with no money and no profession, and he realised, with a little stab of disappointment, that he did not know what to do with himself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

479. “So they pass out of memory and out of these pages, the figures of fifty, of a hundred years ago. Some of them were comic, and some a little tragic, and all of them had faults, but once they were living, breathing men and women like the rest of us, possessing the world that we possess to-day.”

— Daphne du Maurier

480. “It all began to make sense. D as a child. Grandpapa – who died before Angela was born – with, D told us, a kind heart which made everyone love him, and a feeling for family that stretched to nephews, nieces, cousins and second cousins, so that any who needed help were not afraid to come to him, a man of very simple tastes unaffected by fame and fortune.”

— Daphne du Maurier

481. “I love you so much’ he whispered. ‘So much.”

— Daphne du Maurier

482. “I kept thinking of the first time, nearly ten months before, on that Sunday in September. I had been irritated by Louise that morning, sitting so stiff and proud, and had neglected her from that day forward. She had not wavered, but had stayed my friend.”

— Daphne du Maurier

483. “No human being could live in this wasted country, thought Mary, and remain like other people; the very children would be born twisted, like the blackened shrubs of broom, bent by the force of a wind that never ceased, blow as it would from east and west, from north and south. Their minds would be twisted, too, their thoughts evil, dwelling as they must amidst marshland and granite, harsh heather and crumbling stone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

484. “If loving a man meant this pain and anguish and sickness, she wanted none of it. It did away with sanity and composure and made havoc of courage. She was a babbling child now when once she had been indifferent and strong.”

— Daphne du Maurier

485. “Impossible that they should live while I was no more a part of existence.”

— Daphne du Maurier

486. “Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?’ ‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life.”

— Daphne du Maurier

487. “How right she was, I thought. What brings all of us through the years, from the first cry at birth to the sinking pulse at the end, and whom have we left behind us on the way, what ghosts, what crouching figures by what window?”

— Daphne du Maurier

488. “Trust you? Good God, of course I trust you. It’s you who won’t trust me, you damned little fool.‘” He laughed silently, and bent down to her, putting his arms round her, and he kissed her then as he had kissed her in Launceston, but deliberately now, with anger and exasperation. “Play your own game by yourself, then, and leave me to play mine,” he told her. ‘If you must be a boy, I can’t stop you, but for the sake of your face, which I have kissed, and shall kiss again, keep away from danger.”

— Daphne du Maurier

489. “So much for women’s value in other days. Goods reared for purchase, then bought and sold in the market-place, or rather manor. Small wonder that, their duty done, they looked round for consolation, either by taking a lover or by playing an active part in the bargaining over their own daughters and sons.”

— Daphne du Maurier

490. “The other Dona was dead too, and this woman who had taken her place was someone who lived with greater intensity, with greater depth, bringing to every thought and every action a new richness of feeling, and an appreciation, half sensuous in its quality, of all the little things that came to make her day.”

— Daphne du Maurier

491. “The man would not commit himself. “I don’t want to make trouble,” he repeated, “and I don’t know anything. It’s only what people say. Respectable folk don’t go to Jamaica anymore. That’s all I know. In the old days we used to water the horses there, and feed them, and go in for a bit of a bite and drink. But we don’t stop there anymore. We whip the horses past and wait for nothing, not till we get to Five Lanes, and then we don’t bide long.”

— Daphne du Maurier

492. “Tom Jeckell, Kicky’s friend of Pentonville days, was now a budding architect, and resumed his former friendship, and Kicky began to consider himself one of the luckiest fellows in the world to possess so many affectionate friends.”

— Daphne du Maurier

493. “Ellen turned away from them impatiently, and went to the rail once again. Her mother’s friends were all the same – affected and insincere, their conversation a continual mockery of people and things. The poor family on the lower deck had no claim upon their sympathy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

494. “I mean that I am bound to you, even as you are bound to me. From the very first, I knew that it would be so. When I came here, in the winter, and lay upstairs in your room, my hands behind my head, and looked at your sullen portrait on the wall, I smiled to myself, and said, ‘That – and none other.’ And I waited, and I did nothing, for I knew that our time would come.”

— Daphne du Maurier

495. “The feel of her own pillow, and of her own blankets reassured her. Both were familiar. And being tired was familiar too, it was a solid bodily ache, like the tiredness after too much jumping or cricket.”

— Daphne du Maurier

496. “My brother Jem, damn him, he was the baby. Hanging onto mother’s skirts when Matt and I were grown men. I never did see eye to eye with Jem. Too smart he is, too sharp with his tongue. Oh, they’ll catch him in time and hang him, same as they did my father.”

— Daphne du Maurier

497. “Then I was glad of the presence of Jake near to me at all times, for a horror would come upon me because of the vast solitude of space and the solitary splendor of the regions where we were drifting; even the white stars seemed cold and terribly remote, and we, poor human beings on our little ship, were wretched and pathetic in our attempts to equal their wisdom, nor had we any right to venture upon the imperturbability of these waters.”

— Daphne du Maurier

498. “She put the steaming mutton down in front and he smacked his lips ‘they taught you something where you came from, anyway,’ he said. ‘I always say there’s two things women ought to do by instinct, and cookin’s one of ’em.”

— Daphne du Maurier

499. “Supposing you are caught in Launceston with Mr. Bassat’s pony? You would look a fool then, wouldn’t you? And so would I, if they clapped me into prison alongside of you.” “No one’s going to catch me; not yet awhile, anyway. Take a risk, Mary; don’t you like excitement, that you’re so careful of your own skin? They must breed you soft down Helford way.” She rose like a fish to his bait.”

— Daphne du Maurier

500. “Think of the unkind things we have forgotten,” said Niall. “Those are the ones that will be totted up against us. I sometimes wake up in the early morning and go quite cold thinking of all the things I must have done and can’t remember.” “Pappy must have taught you that,” said Celia. “Pappy had a fearful theory that when we die we go to a theater, and we sit down and see the whole of our lives re-acted before us. And nothing is omitted. Not one single, sordid detail. We have to watch it all.”

— Daphne du Maurier