Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “The wild shouting, the laughter, and the singing with which they had fortified themselves for the journey would have been a relief, however loathsome; but this deadly quietude was sinister.”

— Daphne du Maurier

453. “She thought of the laughing, carefree Jem who had driven her to Launceston, who had swung hands with her in the market square, who had kissed her and held her. Now he was grave and silent, his face in shadow. The idea of a dual personality troubled her, and frightened her as well. He was like a stranger to her tonight, obsessed by some grim purpose she could not understand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

454. “Who will ever know your heart, who will ever know your mind? You have that fatal quality of silence – of a tight repression that suggests a hidden fire – yes, a burning fire unquenchable.”

— Daphne du Maurier

455. “He was like a schoolmaster after all. It was just as she had feared. He was now going to make a fuss about her drawings, and write to Pappy, and worry Pappy, and say that time must be set aside for her to work, and everything would become a performance, and a ritual, and be difficult. Drawing would become a burden instead of an escape.”

— Daphne du Maurier

456. “When the water drains from the marshes, and little by little the yellow sands appear, rippling and hard and firm, it seems to my foolish fancy, as I lie here, that I too go seaward with the tide, and all my old hidden dreams that I thought buried for all time are bare and naked to the day, just as the shells and the stones are on the sands.”

— Daphne du Maurier

457. “You are such a part of me that to stand alone leaves me dumb, without speech, without eyes. Life is valueless unless I can share everything with you – beauty, ugliness, pain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

458. “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

459. “Angela and Jeanne were content with their lives. Why did I have to be different? We three got on so well, we never quarrelled, and could discuss every subject under the sun; yet they had no desire to break away, as I did.”

— Daphne du Maurier

460. “All attempts on the part of her son to dissuade her were useless. She remained firm. “If this man is an impostor I shall know it directly I set eyes on him,” she said. “If not, then I shall have done my duty.”

— Daphne du Maurier

461. “Grey put me up for his club. I dine there most evenings. Fellows there have been extraordinarily kind. I go out often, I know many people. Sometimes I remember what Jake said about me being successful one day. I suppose it will come true. It’s all very different, of course, from what I dreamed. But then dreams are apart from the business of living; they are things we shed from us gently as we grow older.”

— Daphne du Maurier

462. “But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “Experience, Major Dodd, has long informed me that no man ever expresses admiration unless he wants something out of the person admired.” “That’s a very cynical view.” “I’m a cynical woman.”

— Daphne du Maurier

471. “H’mph,” growled the squire, “that’s a damned nuisance. I wanted a word or two with Mr. Joss Merlyn. Now look here, my good woman, your precious husband may have bought Jamaica Inn behind my back, in his blackguardly fashion, and we’ll not go into that again now, but one thing I won’t stand for, and that’s having all my land hereabouts made a byword for everything that’s damnable and dishonest round the countryside.”

— Daphne du Maurier

472. “I have asked your uncle, and he does not object, he says, if you are quiet-spoken and not a talker, and will give help when needed. He cannot give you money, or feed you for nothing, as you will understand. He will expect your help in the bar, in return for your board and lodging.”

— Daphne du Maurier

473. “Bread was their main fare – they could not afford meat – and a man earning at the rate of one livre or twenty sous a day, with a hungry family to feed, paid half his wages on bread alone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

474. “This house sheltered us, we spoke, we lived within those walls. That was yesterday.”

— Daphne du Maurier

475. “Why, no doubt there is a risk, just as every day in every man’s life he risks breaking his neck when he steps outside his door.”

— Daphne du Maurier

476. “Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.”

— Daphne du Maurier

477. “What they had dreamed of, schemed for, accomplished, no longer mattered, it was all forgotten.”

— Daphne du Maurier

478. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

480. “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

481. “I think you had better leave the room, William, before I throw something at you.” “Very good, my lady.”

— Daphne du Maurier

482. “We change from the awakening questing creatures we were once, afire with wonder, and expectancy, and doubt, to persons of opinion and authority, our habits formed, our characters moulded in a pattern.”

— Daphne du Maurier

483. “The good monks are waiting upon eternity, they can wait a few more hours for you.”

— Daphne du Maurier

484. “Mary’s mother turned to her and said, “There’s something of me gone in the grave with poor Nell, Mary. I don’t know whether it’s my faith or what it is, but my heart feels tired and I can’t go on anymore.”

— Daphne du Maurier

485. “Robert rather lost his head, and kept forgetting things, napkins at lunch, and handing vegetables. He wore a harassed expression, like someone who has got to catch a train.”

— Daphne du Maurier

486. “Naturally, at the outbreak of the Revolution he followed the example of the clergy and the aristocracy and emigrated to England with his young bride, my mother, and suffered much penury in consequence. His full name was Robert-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, and he died tragically and suddenly in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, on returning to France in the hopes of restoring the family fortunes.”

— Daphne du Maurier

487. “The happy thing about success was that it meant he could provide for his children and his grandchildren, and they would none of them know want and dire poverty as he had done. He would take care that there would be enough for all of them when he died – enough for distant cousins and little grand-nephews and the straggling remnants of the Busson clan.”

— Daphne du Maurier

488. “She walked briskly, with the quick step of one who did not suffer, or perhaps refused to suffer, any of the inconveniences of old age;.”

— Daphne du Maurier

489. “I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

490. “How pleasant,′ Dona said, peeling her fruit; ’the rest of us can only run away from time to time, and however much we pretend to be free, we know it is only for a little while – our hands and our feet are tied.”

— Daphne du Maurier

491. “The word lingered in the air once I had uttered it, dancing before me, and because he received it silently, making no comment, the word magnified itself into something heinous and appalling, a forbidden word, unnatural to the tongue. And I could not call it back, it could never be unsaid.”

— Daphne du Maurier

492. “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

493. “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

494. “The fact that I loved him in a sick, hurt, desperate way, like a child or a dog, did not matter.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

496. “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

497. “What trail of thought, confused and indirect, drove through those minds of theirs, to cloud their judgement? What waves of impulse swept about their being, moving them to anger and withdrawal, or else to sudden generosity? We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

498. “I had not realised until then that grown-up people could be unhappy, that they could cry. I did not want to think about it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

499. “But ‘I read also’ intensified, then and during the following year, with a lot of Scott, a lot of Thackeray, and R. L. Stevenson never far away.”

— Daphne du Maurier

500. “Charles was nowhere to be seen. Maria had to go to look for him. Celia’s anxiety mounted. Pappy would never hang on until after six. He was like a baby with a bottle. He had to keep to his regular time for his whiskey or his whole system became disorganized.”

— Daphne du Maurier