Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “If death came now, he would be an ally; existence was not a thing she welcomed anymore. Life had been crushed from her anyway, and the body lying on the bed did not belong to her. She had no wish to live.”

— Daphne du Maurier

152. “I loved you too much, wanted you too much, had for you too great a tenderness. Now all of this is like a twisted root in my heart, a deadly poison in my brain. You have made of me a madman. You fill me with a kind of horror, a devastating hate that is akin to love – a hunger that is nausea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

153. “Mrs. Van Hopper liked to concentrate on food, and I could tell by the way the sauce ran down her chin that her dish of ravioli pleased her.”

— Daphne du Maurier

154. “Witches were worse than wizards. Wizards were just old men with cloaks and a wand. But witches did not have to be old, they were sometimes beautiful, and then you could not tell until it was too late.”

— Daphne du Maurier

155. “The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

156. “We can never go back again, that much is certain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

157. “It is not easy to be gallant in an apple tree. Perhaps you will tell your mother.”

— Daphne du Maurier

158. “Forget it, Mrs. de Winter, forget it, as he has done, thank heaven, and the rest of us. We none of us want to bring back the past. Maxim least of all. And it’s up to you, you know, to lead us away from it. Not to take us back there again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

159. “A man’s jealousy is like a child’s, fitful and foolish, without depth. A woman’s jealousy is adult, which is very different.”

— Daphne du Maurier

160. “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

161. “First love is not always happy. It can sometimes be like a terrible illness.”

— Daphne du Maurier

162. “Gerald was to die suddenly, following an operation, in April 1934. Daphne did not go to his funeral partly because, in her grief, she did not wish to admit he was dead. Almost immediately afterwards she began writing his biography, Gerald: A Portrait, bringing him back to life on the page.”

— Daphne du Maurier

163. “Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us.”

— Daphne du Maurier

164. “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

165. “How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?”

— Daphne du Maurier

166. “The air was full of their scent, sweet and heady, and it seemed to me as though their very essence had mingled with the running waters of the stream, and become one with the falling rain and the dank rich moss beneath our fee.”

— Daphne du Maurier

167. “There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer; there should be a barrier of thorns about it through which he must cut his way with a knife, and then a galaxy of flowers growing in profusion, with monstrous blooms untended by human hand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

168. “I am no traveller, you are my world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

169. “I believed, in her strange way, that she had loved us both, but we had become dispensable. Something other than blind emotion directed her actions after all. Perhaps she was two persons, torn in two, first one having sway and then the other.”

— Daphne du Maurier

170. “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.”

— Daphne du Maurier

171. “Someday, somehow, I would repay my cousin Rachel.”

— Daphne du Maurier

172. “A woman of feeling does not easily give way. You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender. We have our wars and battles, Mr. Ashey. But women can fight too.”

— Daphne du Maurier

173. “I wondered how it could be that two people who had loved could yet have such a misconception of each other and, with a common grief, grow far apart. There must be something in the nature of love between a man and a woman that drove them to torment and suspicion.”

— Daphne du Maurier

174. “And she passed through the stage door and was inside the theater. Her heart was still beating fast, and her hands were burning, but she felt steadier suddenly, the feeling of panic had gone from her. It was because she was inside the theater.”

— Daphne du Maurier

175. “When I was halfway down the passage I had a curious, inexplicable feeling that I must go back and look in my room again. I went without reason, and stood a moment looking at the gaping wardrobe and the empty bed, and the tray of tea upon the table. I stared at them, impressing them forever on my mind, wondering why they had the power to touch me, to sadden me, as though they were children that did not want me to go away.”

— Daphne du Maurier

176. “His demon of depression was always ready to close in upon him and stifle him, shutting out the beauty and loveliness of life, reminding him that blindness would one day be his, turning his little world to darkness. He used to hold out his hand before his eye. ‘Pem, it’s not so clear as it was. I can’t focus when I look this way. It’s getting worse, I tell you.”

— Daphne du Maurier

177. “Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

178. “It was a mistake to separate us. We should have stayed together. Once a family breaks up and splits, it never comes together again. Not in the old way. If there had been a settled home to which we could have gone, it would have been different. Children need a settled home, a place that smells familiar. A life that goes on, with the same toys, the same walks, the same faces day after day. Where, wet or fine, existence can be a pattern, a routine. We had no pattern. Not after Mama died.”

— Daphne du Maurier

179. “I was seized with a sudden desire to laugh, to cry, to do both, and I had a pain, too, at the pit of my stomach. I wished, for one wild moment, that none of this had happened, that I was alone somewhere, going for a walk, and whistling.”

— Daphne du Maurier

180. “However grim and hateful was this new country, however barren and untilled, with Jamaica Inn standing alone upon the hill as a buffer to the four winds, there was a challenge in the air that spurred Mary Yellan to adventure. It stung her, bringing color to her cheeks and a sparkle to her eyes; it played with her hair, blowing it about her face; and as she breathed deep she drew it through her nostrils and into her lungs, more quenching and sweeter than a draft of cider.”

— Daphne du Maurier

181. “In 1994, Flavia published a biography of her mother, picking up the story where Myself When Young leaves off – the marriage to Tommy Browning and subsequent family life. The biography concludes with a celebration of the scattering of her mother’s ashes over the Cornish cliffs, and a belief that she has joined her dead husband in a boat sailing them into infinity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

182. “No crisis can break through the crust of habit.”

— Daphne du Maurier

183. “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

184. “Truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.”

— Daphne du Maurier

185. “Happy in his silence yet eager for his words.”

— Daphne du Maurier

186. “He was too fond of his home, of his family, of all the little familiar things that went to make his daily life. He did not want these things to change. He wished that time could stand still, or even go back – anything rather than go forward. This business of growing-up, and becoming a man, and facing the future – he did not care for it at all.”

— Daphne du Maurier

187. “I wrote on the birthday itself, ’and as for being twenty-one, I’ll leave it at that. I can’t see that years make any difference, or days, or hours, it’s things that happen to one that matter. I shan’t look back. No guttering candles and dripping wicks for me. When I go let me go quickly, still a bright flame, no flickering! Meanwhile Adams and I celebrated my majority by taking Annabelle Lee out to sea and catching 13 pollock, which was a good start for the boat.”

— Daphne du Maurier

188. “She sat with her chin cupped in her hands, her eyes fixed on the window splashed with mud and rain, hoping with a sort of desperate interest that some ray of light would break the heavy blanket of sky, and but a momentary trace of that lost blue heaven that had mantled Helford yesterday shine for an instant as a forerunner of fortune.”

— Daphne du Maurier

189. “The spaniel came up to me, sniffing at my legs, and I bent down and stroked his ears. “Well, Micky,” I said, “you surely remember me? Poor old Micky, good old Micky.” “Micky has got very fat,” said my mother. “Yes,” I said. “Micky is fond of his food,” said Grey. There was another pause and I went on stroking the spaniel’s ears.”

— Daphne du Maurier

190. “Giles and I think it much more likely that if those holes weren’t done by the rocks they were done deliberately, by some tramp or other. A Communist perhaps. There are heaps of them about. Just the sort of thing a Communist would do.”

— Daphne du Maurier

191. “No, and no again,” he said. “I tell you for the final time, I’ll not be a party to it. I’ll break with you now and forever, and put an end to the agreement. That’s murder you’d have me do, Mr. Merlyn; there’s no other name for it – it’s common murder.”

— Daphne du Maurier

192. “I don’t want to love like a woman or feel like a woman, Mr Davey; there’s pain that way, and suffering, and misery that can last a lifetime. I didn’t bargain for this; I don’t want it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

193. “She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.”

— Daphne du Maurier

194. “So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time.”

— Daphne du Maurier

195. “Good pictures, good furniture and fittings, are all sound investments.”

— Daphne du Maurier

196. “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

197. “For I had no illusions left now, I no longer made any effort to pretend. Last night had shown me too well. My marriage was a failure. All the things that people would say about it if they knew, were true. We did not get on. We were not companions. We were not suited to one another. I was too young for Maxim, too inexperienced, and, more important still, I was not of his world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

198. “Sorrow for the men that mourn, Sorrow for the days that dawn, Sorrow for all things born Into this world of sorrow. And all my life, as far as I can see, All that I hope, or ever hope to be, Is merely driftwood on a lonely sea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

199. “She was a woman, and for no reason in heaven or earth she loved him. He had kissed her, and she was bound to him for ever.”

— Daphne du Maurier

200. “Could time be all-dimensional – yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition? Perhaps.”

— Daphne du Maurier