Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “No crisis can break through the crust of habit.”

— Daphne du Maurier

152. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

154. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

156. “I heard a rustle where the trees grew thickest, and suddenly to my nostrils came that rank vixen smell about me in the air, tainting the very leaves under my feet; yet I saw nothing, and all the daffodils, leaning from the banks on either side of me, stayed poised and still, without a breath to stir them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

162. “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

163. “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

164. “Avrei voluto tornare indietro, catturare di nuovo l’attimo fuggito, ma poi mi resi conto che anche se lo avessimo fatto non sarebbe stato lo stesso, perfino la luce del sole non sarebbe stata uguale, avrebbe gettato un’ombra diversa, la contadinella questa volta non ci avrebbe salutati, forse non ci avrebbe neppure visti. Il pensiero aveva un che di raggelante, un pizzico di malinconia.”

— Daphne du Maurier

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

168. “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

169. “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

170. “The English yokel is not at his best when he makes love.”

— Daphne du Maurier

171. “Something we always want and never have. Something that is forever out of reach.”

— Daphne du Maurier

172. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “But you know the old saying? Out of sight, out of mind. If people aren’t there to be talked about the talk dies. It’s the way of the world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

178. “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

179. “What I had thought was love for me, for myself as a person, was not love. It was just that he was a man, and I was his wife and was young, and he was lonely.”

— Daphne du Maurier

180. “I’ll not bide in Heaven, nor rest here in my grave. My spirit will linger with the ones I love – an’ when they’re sorrowful and feared in themselves, I’ll come to them; and God Himself won’t keep me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

191. “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

192. “Your father,” I answered him, “has enough work on his hands without keeping house for a crippled woman.”

— Daphne du Maurier

193. “What a funny thing to do,” said the grandmother. “I don’t think much of books for a wedding-present. Nobody ever gave me any books when I was married. I should never have read them if they had.”

— Daphne du Maurier

194. “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

195. “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

196. “What is the truth?” I asked, in renewed agony of doubt – for had I, after all, done wrong in leaving my husband to his possible fate at le Chesne-Bidault? Were hordes of brigands even now setting fire to my home and everything I held dear? “The truth?” repeated Robert. “Nobody ever knows the truth in this world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

198. “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.’ Ambrose used to say to me in Florence that it was worth the tedium of visitors to experience the pleasure of their going. He was so right.”

— Daphne du Maurier

199. “I know I cried that night, bitter youthful tears that could not come from me today. That kind of crying, deep into a pillow, does not happen after we are twenty-one. The throbbing head, the swollen eyes, the tight, contracted throat. And the wild anxiety in the morning to hide all traces from the world, sponging with cold water, dabbing eau-de-Cologne, the furtive dash of powder that is significant in itself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

200. “I was reminded of my first journey as a child in France, traveling by sleeper overnight, throwing open the carriage window in the morning to see foreign fields fly by, villages, towns, figures laboring the land humped like the plowman now, and thinking, with childish wonder, “Are they alive like me, or just pretending?”

— Daphne du Maurier