Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “So you see, when war comes to one’s village, one’s doorstep, it isn’t tragic and impersonal any longer. It is just an excuse to vomit private hatred. That is why I am not a great patriot.”

— Daphne du Maurier

52. “The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.”

— Daphne du Maurier

53. “People who travel are always fugitives.”

— Daphne du Maurier

54. “Nothing like a cup of tea to make a person feel better, man or woman.”

— Daphne du Maurier

55. “The trouble is, walking in Venice becomes compulsive once you start. Just over the next bridge, you say, and then the next one beckons.”

— Daphne du Maurier

56. “How simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten.”

— Daphne du Maurier

57. “If there’s one thing that makes a man sick, it’s to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

58. “She knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live.”

— Daphne du Maurier

59. “All autobiography is self-indulgent.”

— Daphne du Maurier

60. “People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.”

— Daphne du Maurier

61. “Living as we do in an age of noise and bluster, success is now measured accordingly. We must all be seen, and heard, and on the air.”

— Daphne du Maurier

62. “Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession any more. 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.”

— Daphne du Maurier

63. “A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work.”

— Daphne du Maurier

64. “I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.”

— Daphne du Maurier

65. “Watch that boy. He’s going to startle somebody someday.”

— Daphne du Maurier

66. “She had not understood. She belonged to another breed of men and women, another race than I. They had guts, the women of her race. They were not like me. If it had been Beatrice who had done this thing instead of me she would have put on her other dress and gone down again to welcome her guests. She would have stood by Giles’s side, and shaken hands with people, a smile on her face. I could not do that. I had not the pride, I had not the guts. I was badly bred.”

— Daphne du Maurier

67. “I do love you,” I said. “I love you dreadfully. You’ve made me very unhappy and I’ve been crying all night because I thought I should never see you again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

68. “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. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty one. They are so full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.”

— Daphne du Maurier

69. “She cared for nothing and for no one. And then she was beaten in the end. But it wasn’t a man, it wasn’t a woman. The sea got her. The sea was too strong for her. The sea got her in the end.”

— Daphne du Maurier

70. “She’s got the three things that matter in a wife,’ she told me: ’breeding, brains, and beauty.”

— Daphne du Maurier

71. “You have blotted out the past for me, you know, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo. But for you I should have left long ago, gone to Italy, and Greece, and further still perhaps. You have spared me all those wanderings.”

— Daphne du Maurier

72. “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

73. “He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. He still thought about Rebecca. He would never love me because of Rebecca. She was in the house still, as Mrs Danvers had said; she was in that room in the west wing, she was in the library, in the morning-room, in the gallery above the hall.”

— Daphne du Maurier

74. “A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils about the pair and made them prisoners.”

— Daphne du Maurier

75. “It was not chance that brought us together again. I am sure of that. These things are predestined. I have a theory that each man’s life is like a pack of cards, and those we meet and sometimes love are shuffled with us. We find ourselves in the same suit, held by the hand of Fate. The game is played, we are discarded, and pass on.”

— Daphne du Maurier

76. “You have blotted out the past for me, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo.”

— Daphne du Maurier

77. “There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair.”

— Daphne du Maurier

78. “Poor whims of fancy, tender and unharsh. They are the enemy to bitterness and regret, and sweeten this exile we have brought upon ourselves.”

— Daphne du Maurier

79. “Non ramentare che le ore felici.”

— Daphne du Maurier

80. “Marat, in L’Ami du Peuple, declared that the only way to save the Revolution for the people was to slaughter the aristocrats en masse; yet if this happened the innocent might suffer with the guilty. Somehow, we no longer seemed to preach the brotherhood of man.”

— Daphne du Maurier

81. “The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.”

— Daphne du Maurier

82. “Death should be different. It should be like bidding farewell to someone at a station before a long journey, but without the strain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

83. “Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer’s fancy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

84. “Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

85. “This was more than I had hitherto endured, even from her, but the swift lash of his reply was unexpected. “Not since Ethelred,” he said, “the one who was called Unready. In fact, it was while staying with my family that the name was given him. He was invariably late for dinner.”

— Daphne du Maurier

86. “Tall and dark she was. She gave you the feeling of a snake. I seen her here with me own eyes. By night she’d come.”

— Daphne du Maurier

87. “I began to understand why some people could not bear the clamour of the sea. It has a mournful harping note sometimes, and the very persistence of it, that eternal roll and thunder and hiss, plays a jagged tune upon the nerves.”

— Daphne du Maurier

88. “I wonder what my life would be today, if Mrs. Van Hopper had not been a snob.”

— Daphne du Maurier

89. “I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist, had never come to Manderley. I had gone back in thought and in person to the days that were gone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

90. “This was a woman’s room, graceful, fragile, the room of someone who had chosen every particle of furniture with great care, so that each chair, each vase, each small, infinitesimal thing should be in harmony with one another, and with her own personality.”

— Daphne du Maurier

91. “For myself, I could think of nothing more likely to cause panic and consternation among a crowd of women than to be shut up within a church without their menfolk, and to have the incessant clanging of that same church’s bell sounding its warning from the belfry above their heads.”

— Daphne du Maurier

92. “There was nothing for it but to sit in my usual place beside Mrs. Van Hopper while she, like a large, complacent spider, spun her wide net of tedium about the stranger’s person.” I think I’ve met Mrs. Van Hopper on numerous occasions.”

— Daphne du Maurier

93. “The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky.”

— Daphne du Maurier

94. “I put Manderley first, before anything else. And it does not prosper, that sort of love. They don’t preach about it in the churches. Christ said nothing about stones, and bricks, and walls, the love that a man can bear for his plot of earth, his soil, his little kingdom.”

— Daphne du Maurier

95. “And I should make violent love to you behind a palm tree.”

— Daphne du Maurier

96. “It was very peaceful and quiet. I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say “By the way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

97. “We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”

— Daphne du Maurier

98. “The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.”

— Daphne du Maurier

99. “I could fight the living but I could not fight the dead.”

— Daphne du Maurier

100. “Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have our moments of depression, but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and... I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us.”

— Daphne du Maurier