Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Now you are here, let me show you everything,” she said, her voice ingratiating and sweet as honey, horrible, false, “I know you want to see it all, you’ve wanted to for a long time, and you were too shy to ask. It’s a lovely room, isn’t it? The loveliest room you have ever seen.”

— Daphne du Maurier

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Listen, my sweet. When you were a little girl, were you ever forbidden to read certain books, and did your father put those books under lock and key?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, then. A husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s better kept under lock and key. So that’s that. And now eat up your peaches, and don’t ask me any more questions, or I shall put you in the corner.”

— Daphne du Maurier

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and, like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

160. “But I never dared ask Mrs. Danvers what she did about it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

164. “A wave of perfume came from these fine folk, a strange exotic scent like flowers no longer fresh, whose petals curl, and this stale richness somehow mingled with the drab dirt of those beside us, pressing forward even as we did, in a dumb desire to see the Queen.”

— Daphne du Maurier

165. “Alas, the countless links are strong, That bind us to our clay, The loving spirit lingers long, And would not pass away.”

— Daphne du Maurier

166. “I was aware of a sense of freedom, as though I had no responsibilities at all.”

— Daphne du Maurier

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end. We have conquered ours, or so we believe.”

— Daphne du Maurier

172. “Curious thing that the younger men of today were glib enough when they talked of ideals and how everyone must progress in a changing world, but when the crunch came they were very ready to let the older generation pay the piper.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

174. “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

175. “There are some women, Philip, good women very possibly, who through no fault of their own impel disaster. Whatever they touch, somehow turns to tragedy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

176. “How young and inexperienced I must have seemed, and how I felt it, too. One was too sensitive, too raw, there were thorns and pin-pricks in so many words that in reality fell lightly on air.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

178. “It’s natural, I suppose,” said Colonel Julyan, “for all of us to wish to look different. We are all children in some ways.”

— Daphne du Maurier

179. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

181. “They say death does this to us once we are warned. Unconsciously, we strive not to waste time. Pettiness falls away, with all those things of little value in our lives. Could we but have known sooner, we tell ourselves, it would have been otherwise; no anger, no destruction, above everything no pride.”

— Daphne du Maurier

182. “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

183. “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

184. “He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. – from a Difference in Temperament.”

— Daphne du Maurier

185. “It’s true 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

186. “We don’t need vows, you and I’, he said, ’nor gold nor metal. What we are to each other lasts to the grave and beyond.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

188. “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

189. “Men and women were like the animals on the farm at Helford, she supposed; there was a common law of attraction for all living things, some similarity of skin or touch, and they would go to one another. This was no choice made with the mind.”

— Daphne du Maurier

190. “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

191. “Mary Rose that did it. Mary Rose was a country girl. Always hiding up apple trees, and then disappearing on the island. She was a ghost, and Charles fell in love with the ghost.” “What did you fall in love with?” asked Niall. “As I was being Mary Rose, I fell in love with Simon,” said Maria. “And Charles was my idea of Simon. Quiet, dependable, devoted. Besides, at that particular time there was no one much around. And all those flowers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

192. “Jim was no more interested than Mrs. Trigg had been. It was, Nat thought, like air raids in the war. No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.”

— Daphne du Maurier

193. “I am notorious,” said Dona, “for making unfortunate remarks.”

— Daphne du Maurier

194. “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

195. “Yes, of course it was kind, but why must I be reminded of the fact, and would I ever write enough short stories to sell, and so make some money that would be mine, all mine, so that I could pay the cook and buy my own food, and keep myself and be truly independent? It just had to happen. I refused to be beaten.”

— Daphne du Maurier

196. “Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered.”

— Daphne du Maurier

197. “On the table there, polished now and plain, an ugly case would stand containing butterflies and moths, and another one with bird’s eggs wrapped in cotton wool. “Not all this junk in here,” I would say, “take them to the schoolroom darlings,” and they would run off, shouting, calling to one another, but the little one staying behind, pottering on his own, quieter than the others.”

— Daphne du Maurier

198. “Perhaps we shall not see each other again. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best as I can, the story of your family. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that same breath, shatter and destroy it. If what I write displeases you, it will not matter. Throw my letters in the fire unread, and keep your illusions. For myself, I have always preferred to know the truth.”

— Daphne du Maurier

199. “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

200. “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