Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “To me, lonely, anxious, and a survivor of too many emotional shipwrecks, he came almost as a savior, as an answer to prayer. To be strong as he was, and tender too, lacking all personal conceit, I had not met with that. I know what he was to me. But I to him...”

— Daphne du Maurier

452. “Doctors he would not tolerate; he had always believed in treating himself, and now he had not even the energy to do this.”

— Daphne du Maurier

453. “The trouble is that goodness dies, and lies buried in the earth. Cleverness passes on and becomes degenerate.”

— Daphne du Maurier

454. “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

455. “This time the man confessed that there was slight detachment of the retina, and that Kicky must give up all thought of working for several months, and devote himself to the cure. He must have treatment at least once a week, continue with the ordinary bathing and poulticing at home, and put himself on a diet. He must, in fact, resign himself to being more or less of an invalid for the immediate future.”

— Daphne du Maurier

456. “Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession anymore. 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. Always, forever after, the possessor of the talent must keep a wary eye upon the purchaser. Therefore, if you were sensitive, if you were proud, you turned your back upon the market. You made excuses.”

— Daphne du Maurier

457. “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

458. “To him, the drug released the complex brew within the brain that served up the savored past. To me, it proved that the past was living still, that we were all participants, all witnesses. I was Roger, I was Bodrugan, I was Cain; and in being so was more truly myself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

459. “But you. I can’t forget what it has done to you. I was looking at you, thinking of nothing else through lunch. It’s gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won’t come back again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

460. “Death was an executioner, lopping a flower before it bloomed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

461. “You have never lived anywhere else,” he said, “and you are not an individual at all, you’re just a hotch-potch of every character you’ve ever acted. Your mood and your personality change with each new part that comes along. There is no such woman as Maria, there never has been. Even your children know it. And that’s why they are fascinated by you, for two days only, and then go running up to the nursery to Polly, because Polly is real, and genuine, and alive.”

— Daphne du Maurier

462. “She turned round and faced me, smiling, one hand in her pocket, the other holding her cigarette.”

— Daphne du Maurier

463. “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

464. “Never dance again?” said Niall. “But what would happen? What would everybody do?” “Nothing would happen,” she said. “The theater is a funny world, you know. They forget one very soon.”

— Daphne du Maurier

465. “The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality.”

— Daphne du Maurier

466. “I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. I was a child yesterday. I had not forgotten.”

— Daphne du Maurier

467. “And looking north, inland from the Gribben, I could just make out the grey roof of a house there, set in its own grounds amongst trees. Yes, Angela and I were told. That would be Menabilly. Belongs to Dr Rashleigh, but he seldom lives there.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

469. “Once there had been a path across the mountains, and restlessness, and an urge to fight, and a dream of many women, and now there was a home that was my home, and peace, and relaxation, and no dreams but the reality of one woman. I did not know if it was I who had changed, or the world that had changed about me, but so it was, and I could not call back the dreams that had gone from me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

470. “I thought at first somebody was dead, but after a while I saw it was just England.”

— Daphne du Maurier

471. “No.” Monsieur Ledru mused, as though he had but half heard. Then with a start: “Oh, but most certainly not. No, it is rather a heaviness upon the mind – a weight as of lead upon brain and thoughts, while my legs are like paper under me.” Lifting his hat he passed a thin hand over his forehead. “It is such as when one cannot recall a name and goes under a burden until memory releases it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

472. “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

473. “I am considered silly, selfish and incredible by all concerned. No use in explaining. I prefer to live happily in discomfort here in beloved Fowey to living comfortably, query, and discontentedly in indifferent Hampstead. That’s all. I’m used to being alone. Why fuss? Why struggle? It’s funny that no one seems really to understand my craving for solitude, that I am sincerely, and without posing, happiest when alone. It’s my natural state.”

— Daphne du Maurier

474. “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

475. “Freada said nothing was worth doing without effort. Pappy used to say that too. Everyone said it. But when things happened easily, what was the sense in driving yourself, in sweating blood?”

— Daphne du Maurier

476. “Here was Pierre laying down the law about what the King should say to the Assembly, or what the Assembly should say to the King, and yet he could not order his own unruly boys to come down from off the hay-shocks. My mother would have done so and boxed the ears of the pair of them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

477. “I was a person of importance, I was grown up at last. That girl, who, tortured by shyness, would stand outside the sitting room door twisting a handkerchief in her hands, while from within came that babble of confused chatter so unnerving to the intruder – she had gone with the wind that afternoon. She was a poor creature, and I thought of her with scorn if I considered her at all.”

— Daphne du Maurier

478. “The glass world was unique, a law unto itself. It had its own rules and customs, and a separate language too, handed down not only from father to son but from master to apprentice, instituted heaven knows how many centuries ago wherever the glass-makers settled – in Normandy, in Lorraine, by the Loire – but always, naturally, by forests, for wood was the glass foundry’s food, the mainstay of its existence.”

— Daphne du Maurier

479. “We never knew the ordinary placid routine of child life, the settled home, the humdrum day by day. For if yesterday we were in London, tomorrow would be Paris, and the after-tomorrow, Rome.”

— Daphne du Maurier

480. “A solitary curlew stood pensively beside the stream, watching his reflection in the water; and then his long beak darted with incredible swiftness into the reeds, stabbing at the soft mud, and, turning his head, he tucked his legs under him and rose into the air, calling his plaintive note, and streaking for the south.”

— Daphne du Maurier

481. “How alive was her writing though, how full of force. Those curious, sloping letters.”

— Daphne du Maurier

482. “If Michael Joseph of Curtis Brown tells me he doesn’t like it, or I must rewrite, he can go to hell. I can’t go back to it any more.”

— Daphne du Maurier

483. “The waiters were getting tired, and very bored. The Head Waiter came again and pushed the bill on a plate, neatly folded, under Pappy’s eyes. “What’s this?” said Pappy. “Somebody want my autograph? Who’s got a pencil? Anyone got a pencil so that I can sign my autograph?” The waiter coughed. He avoided Celia’s eyes. “It’s the bill, Pappy,” whispered Celia. “The waiter wants you to pay the bill.”

— Daphne du Maurier

484. “I’m convinced that a chap’s best chance of doing his finest work is by sticking very much to himself, and of course working very hard, and, most important of all, by talking very little about it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

485. “I wondered why I had ever despised these things, why they had once seemed pitiful and absurd. I wondered why the placidity of a home seemed necessary to me now, and why I no longer yearned for the turmoil of a ship upon the sea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

486. “In two minutes she would have forgotten all about having asked Celia for the day, and would be planning something else. If only Maria lived a little closer, Celia could have shared the responsibility of Caroline. It would only mean two children to look after instead of one. Because Pappy was a child. He needed humoring, and coaxing, and taking care of in much the same way as a child.”

— Daphne du Maurier

487. “If the flower of my generation had not been blown to bits in the war they would have brought it back again. Now it’s too late. So few of us are left.” The bride at St. George’s.”

— Daphne du Maurier

488. “Mander smiled: “A woman is as old as she looks, a man is as old as he feels, Sir Julius. You know the old saying?”

— Daphne du Maurier

489. “She does not know what is good for her, any more than all the so-called patriots in the country. Someone should have the nerve, and the power, to say ‘Enough.’ But they’re like a lot of sheep without a shepherd.”

— Daphne du Maurier

490. “The house was inhabited not by the dead but by the living, and I was the restless wanderer, I was the ghost.”

— Daphne du Maurier

491. “Here is Tom Jenkyns, honest and dull, except when he drank too much. It’s true that his wife was a scold, but that was no excuse to kill her. If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

492. “No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be.”

— Daphne du Maurier

493. “There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the gray stone shining in the moonlight of my dream...”

— Daphne du Maurier

494. “It’s only just turned the half-hour, Madam,” said Norah in a special voice, bright and cheerful like the nurse. I wondered if Maxim’s grandmother realized that people spoke to her in this way. I wondered when they had done so for the first time, and if she had noticed then. Perhaps she had said to herself, “They think I’m getting old, how very ridiculous,” and then little by little she had become accustomed to it, and now it was as though they had always done so, it was part of her background.”

— Daphne du Maurier

495. “I love the stillness of a room after a party. The chairs are moved, the cushions disarranged, everything is there to show that people enjoyed themselves; and one comes back to the empty room happy that it’s over, happy to relax and say, ‘Now we are alone again.’ Ambrose used to say to me in Florence that it was worth the tedium of visitors to experience the pleasure of their going. He was so right.”

— Daphne du Maurier

496. “But he was quite eclipsed by one of the deputies of the Third Estate, a young lawyer called Robespierre – I wonder if Pierre has heard of him? – who suggested that the Archbishop would do better if he told his fellow clergy to join forces with the patriots who were friends to the people, and that if they wanted to help they might set an example by giving up some of their own luxurious way of living, and returning to the simple ways of the founder of their faith.”

— Daphne du Maurier

497. “Joss Merlyn shouted at the top of his voice, and the noise was deafening. Mary did not fear him like this; the whole thing was bluster and show; it was when he lowered his voice and whispered that she knew him to be deadly. For all his thunder he was frightened; she could see that; and his confidence was rudely shaken.”

— Daphne du Maurier

498. “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

499. “Heaven he would never achieve, and the hell that he had known was lost to him.”

— Daphne du Maurier

500. “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