Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “But Part Four would not be easy. The last member of the four generations, Jane Slade’s great-granddaughter Jennifer, was going to be rather tiresome. I was not sure what to do with her. Could it be that I had lost interest in the whole story?”

— Daphne du Maurier

452. “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

453. “Had I been offered all the treasures in the world I could not have turned and gone down to the cottage or the beach again. It was as though someone waited down there, in the little garden where the nettles grew. Someone who watched and listened.”

— Daphne du Maurier

454. “How am I to know?” said Maria. “People never tell one the truth, not the real truth. It may be all right tonight, and the notices may be good, and everybody be nice – but I shan’t really know.” “You’ll know all right,” he said, “here.” And he tapped his chest. “Inside,” he said. “I feel it’s all wrong to be nervous,” said Maria. “I feel it’s lack of confidence. One ought to go right ahead, never minding.”

— Daphne du Maurier

455. “Now, looking about me in the desolation and the splendour, I knew what I had lacked all these years. I forgot my fellow travellers, forgot the grey fuselage of the crippled ’plane – an anachronism, surely, amid the wilderness of centuries – and forgot too my grey hair, my heavy frame, and all the burden of my five-and-fifty years. I was a boy again, hopeful, eager, seeking an answer to eternity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

458. “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

459. “At twenty-six she had held her little world between her ruthless, exquisite fingers, and here was her grandson, at the same age, launching himself into the problematical future, in which he was to win fame by satirising the same society she had led by the ears at the beginning of the century.”

— Daphne du Maurier

460. “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

461. “Meantime, the Declaration of the Rights of Man made all men equal, if it did not make them brothers, and within a week of its passing into law there were riots in Le Mans, and disturbances in Paris too, with the price of bread as high as it had been before, and unemployment rife. Bakers were blamed in every city for charging too dearly for their four-pound loaf, and they in turn put the blame upon the grain merchants; all men were at fault save those who leveled the accusations.”

— Daphne du Maurier

462. “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

463. “What is the truth?” I asked, in renewed agony of doubt – for had I, after all, done wrong in leaving my husband to his possible fate at le Chesne-Bidault? Were hordes of brigands even now setting fire to my home and everything I held dear? “The truth?” repeated Robert. “Nobody ever knows the truth in this world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

464. “Charles said, “I haven’t looked at the Acrostic. A word of nine letters in the crossword caught my attention.” “Oh, what was that?” “An invertebrate animal preying upon the body of another animal.” Niall struck the first chord on the piano. “A parasite,” he said.”

— Daphne du Maurier

465. “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

466. “I did not know what to answer, because it would be too sudden and too direct, but I knew in my heart that what I wanted was everything that could be between a woman and a man; not at first, of course, but later, when we had found our other mountain, or our wilderness, or wherever it was we might go to hide ourselves from the world. There was no need to rehearse all that now. The point was that I was prepared to follow her anywhere if she would let me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

467. “Niall never really knew which; but he used to lie in bed until she returned in the middle of the day, and he read every one of the works of Maupassant, the book in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other.”

— Daphne du Maurier

468. “She sipped her glass of water, crooking her finger, smiling at Maria. I can’t make up my mind, thought Niall, whether Polly is a criminal, cunning and dangerous, ripe for the Old Bailey; or just so bloody stupid that it would be kindness to wring her neck and spare the world more pain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

469. “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

470. “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

471. “Does forty-two seem very old to you?” he said.”

— Daphne du Maurier

472. “Daphne du Maurier was the fifth-generation descendant of a French master craftsman who settled in England during the Revolution. The Glass-Blowers, the fictionalized story of his family, was originally published in 1963, but du Maurier first conceived of writing about her French forebears in the mid-1950s. She had recently completed her novel about Mary Anne Clarke, her famous great-great-grandmother, and a complementary work about the French side of her family seemed logical.”

— Daphne du Maurier

473. “There was some misunderstanding,” she replied. “Your uncle bought it through a friend. Mr. Bassat did not know who Uncle Joss was until we were settled in, and then he was not very pleased.”

— Daphne du Maurier

474. “I know I must seem unsympathetic and cold, but this is the nineteenth century, you know, and men don’t murder one another without reason. I believe I have as much right to drive you on the King’s highway as your uncle himself. Having gone so far, don’t you think you had better let me hear the rest of your story? What is your name, and how long have you been living at Jamaica Inn?”

— Daphne du Maurier

475. “I heard a rustle where the trees grew thickest, and suddenly to my nostrils came that rank vixen smell about me in the air, tainting the very leaves under my feet; yet I saw nothing, and all the daffodils, leaning from the banks on either side of me, stayed poised and still, without a breath to stir them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

476. “George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier – how noble it sounded! The child would at least have a good start in life, with such remarkable names.”

— Daphne du Maurier

477. “I was young, and I’d never been hurt before.”

— Daphne du Maurier

478. “He wanted to lose the memory of that world; they wished to hold it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

479. “The door from the kitchen opened, and the smell of Freada’s Chesterfield cigarettes.”

— Daphne du Maurier

480. “I found this hardly comforting, and wondered if there was not some virtue in the quality of insincerity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

481. “He’s made his own hell and there’s no one but himself to thank for it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

482. “Years of study, years of training, the fluency with which I spoke their language, taught their history, described their culture, had never brought me closer to the people themselves.”

— Daphne du Maurier

483. “This moment now, at twenty past eleven, this must never be lost,” and I shut my eyes to make the experience more lasting.”

— Daphne du Maurier

484. “When I go, Danny, I want to go quickly, like the snuffing out of a candle.”

— Daphne du Maurier

485. “Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die; the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

486. “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

487. “The months of anxiety had taken their toll of my mother, with the journeys backwards and forwards to Paris which had continued during the summer. She had never cared for the capital; and now, she told us, she had no desire to set foot in it again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

488. “The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow.”

— Daphne du Maurier

489. “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

490. “This astonished us as children, for we grew up beside the charcoal burners, called them by their Christian names, watched them at work, visited them in their log huts when they were ill; but to my mother, the bailiff’s daughter from St. Christophe, gently nurtured, educated and well spoken, the rude shouts of these wild men of the woods at midnight must have sounded like devils in hell.”

— Daphne du Maurier

491. “Mournful, mournful. I wanted to be alone, but the others would laugh and talk. Always the past, just out of reach, waiting to be recaptured. Why did I feel so sad thinking of a past I had never known?”

— Daphne du Maurier

492. “He realised now that there was no hope for his left eye; detachment of the retina was complete; and just before Christmas came again the oculist told him that there was a chance his right eye would also become affected. The shock was terrible.”

— Daphne du Maurier

493. “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

494. “We can see the film stars of yesterday in yesterday’s films, hear the voices of poest and singers on a record, keep the plays of dead dramatists upon our bookshelves, but the actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls.”

— Daphne du Maurier

495. “You’re all wounded and hurt and torn inside.”

— Daphne du Maurier

496. “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

497. “My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society. Then we are given the boot. The passerby averts his gaze, and we are left to crawl out of the ditch alone, or stay there and die.”

— Daphne du Maurier

498. “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

499. “You ought to take more exercise, if you’re inclined to have a liver. Play golf.”

— Daphne du Maurier

500. “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