Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them. Something happened a year ago that altered my whole life, and I want to forget every phase in my existence up to that time. Those days are finished. They are blotted out. I must begin living all over again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

153. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

155. “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

156. “There is a tisana for that too,’ she said, ‘made from the leaves of raspberries and of nettles. If a woman drinks that for six months before the birth, she has her baby without pain.’ ‘That’s witchcraft,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t think it right to do so.’ ‘What nonsense! Why should women suffer?’ said my cousin Rachel.”

— Daphne du Maurier

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Marriage and piracy do not go together.”

— Daphne du Maurier

162. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

164. “If it must be so, let’s not weep nor complain If I have failed, or you, or life turned sullen. We have had these things, they do not come again, But the flag still flies and the city has not fallen.” Humbert Wolfe.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

169. “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

170. “Children’s tears are very near the surface, and come at the first crisis.”

— Daphne du Maurier

171. “They were ageless, they were sexless, they were neither male nor female, old or young, but the beauty of their faces, and of their bodies too, was more stirring and exciting than anything I had ever seen or known, and with a sudden longing I wanted to be one of them, to be dressed as they were dressed, to love as they must love, to laugh and worship and be silent.”

— Daphne du Maurier

172. “I always expect people to ask themselves. Life is too short to send out invitations.”

— Daphne du Maurier

173. “Resignation brings its own reward.”

— Daphne du Maurier

174. “This, I think, was the essence of what it meant to me. To be bound, yet free; to be alone, yet in their company; to be born in my own time yet living, unknown, in theirs.”

— Daphne du Maurier

175. “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

176. “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

177. “She had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.”

— Daphne du Maurier

178. “Ambrose used to say to me in Florence that it was worth the tedium of visitors to experience the pleasure of their going.”

— Daphne du Maurier

179. “I had left the land of fantasy, to her to enter into it. Two persons therefore could not share a dream. Except in darkness, as in make-believe. Each figure, then, a phantom.”

— Daphne du Maurier

180. “In the animal kingdom a freak was a thing of abhorrence, at once hunted and destroyed, or driven out into the wilderness.”

— Daphne du Maurier

181. “As soon as his laughter died away the smile faded from Aunt Patience’s face, and the strained, haunted expression returned again, the fixed, almost idiot stare that she wore habitually in the presence of her husband. Mary saw at once that the little freedom from care which her aunt had enjoyed during the past week was now no more, and she had again become the nervy, shattered creature of before.”

— Daphne du Maurier

182. “Whoever has loved much, felt deeply, trodden a certain path in happiness or pain, leaves an imprint of himself for evermore.”

— Daphne du Maurier

183. “The bells ceased and died away, yet the echo seemed to sound still in my ears, solemn, sonorous, tolling not for my mission, insignificant and small, nor for the lives of the people in the streets, but for the souls of men and women long since dead, and for eternity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

184. “She had the cold, angry face that spelled trouble, the face that sent servants flying, stage managers running for their lives, and ourselves to whatever distant room we might possess.”

— Daphne du Maurier

185. “No lives have been lost as yet, and none of our women have been taken,” said Godolphin stiffly, “but as the fellow is a Frenchman we all realize that it is only a question of time before something dastardly occurs.”

— Daphne du Maurier

186. “Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

187. “I have no great opinion of the human race. It is just as well, now and again, that we have wars, so that men know what it is to suffer pain. One day they will exterminate themselves, as they have exterminated the rabbits. So much the better. The world will be peaceful again, with nothing left but the forest over there, and the soil.”

— Daphne du Maurier

188. “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

189. “All this awaited me in the suite, while he, once he had left me at the hotel, would go away somewhere alone, towards the sea perhaps, feel the wind on his cheek, follow the sun; and it might happen that he would lose himself in those memories that I knew nothing of, that I could not share, he would wander down the years that were gone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

190. “The visitors sat down, languid, and content to rest. Seecombe brought cake and wine.”

— Daphne du Maurier

191. “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

192. “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

193. “It was Charles who called us the parasites. The way he said it was surprising, and sudden; he was one of those quiet reserved sort of men, not given to talking much or stating his opinion, unless upon the most ordinary facts of day by day, so that his outburst – coming, as it did, towards the end of the long, wet Sunday afternoon, when we had none of us done anything but read the papers and yawn and stretch before the fire – had the force of an explosion.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

195. “No, I’m thinking of my conscience and of Almighty God; and though I’ll face any man in a fair fight, and take punishment if need be, when it comes to the killing of innocent folk, and maybe women and children among them, that’s going straight to hell, Joss Merlyn, and you know it as well as I do.”

— Daphne du Maurier

196. “However demanding Pappy may have been, however tiring, however petulant, he was, in the true and deepest sense, her refuge. He shielded her from action. His was the cloak that covered her. She need not go out into the world, she need not struggle, need not face the things that other people face – because she looked after Pappy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

197. “Today, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one lightly and are soon forgotten, but then – how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.”

— Daphne du Maurier

198. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

200. “I looked on her profile. She was always a stranger, thus. Those neat clipped features on a coin. Dark and withdrawn, a foreign woman standing in a doorway, a shawl about her head, her hand outstretched. But full-face, when she smiled, a stranger never. The Rachel that I knew, that I had loved.”

— Daphne du Maurier