Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “One had no right to play about with people’s lives. One should not interfere with their emotions. A word, a look, a smile, a frown, did something to another human being, waking response or aversion, and a web was woven which had no beginning and no end, spreading outward and inward too, merging, entangling, so that the struggle of one depended upon the struggle of the other.”

— Daphne du Maurier

202. “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

203. “I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album. Those roof-tops and that sea were mine no more. They belonged to yesterday, to the past.”

— Daphne du Maurier

204. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

206. “He would stare down at us in our new world from a long-distant past – a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

207. “I don’t know what stuff her gowns were made of, whether of stiff silk, or satin, or brocade, but they seemed to sweep the floor, and lift, and sweep again and whether it was the gown itself that floated, or she wearing it and moving forward with such grace, but the library, that had seemed dark and austere before she entered, would be suddenly alive.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

213. “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

214. “The thought of sleep now was impossible. She was too wide awake, too alive in every nerve, and although the dislike and fear of her uncle was as strong as ever within her, a growing interest and curiosity held the mastery. She understood something of his business now. What she had witnessed here tonight was smuggling on the grand scale. There was no doubt that Jamaica Inn was ideally situated for his purpose, and he must have bought it for that reason alone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

218. “Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die; the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

219. “This astonished us as children, for we grew up beside the charcoal burners, called them by their Christian names, watched them at work, visited them in their log huts when they were ill; but to my mother, the bailiff’s daughter from St. Christophe, gently nurtured, educated and well spoken, the rude shouts of these wild men of the woods at midnight must have sounded like devils in hell.”

— Daphne du Maurier

220. “The relief was tremendous. I did not feel sick anymore. The pain had gone... I had no idea I was so empty.”

— Daphne du Maurier

221. “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

222. “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

223. “The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality.”

— Daphne du Maurier

224. “The experts are right, he thought, Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

225. “Harder, Max, harder,’ she would say, laughing up at him, and he would do as she told him.”

— Daphne du Maurier

226. “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

227. “He took her face in his hands and kissed it, and she saw that he was laughing. “When you’re an old maid in mittens down at Helford, you’ll remember that,” he said, “and it will have to last you to the end of your days. ‘He stole horses,’ you’ll say to yourself, ’and he didn’t care for women; and but for my pride I’d have been with him now.”

— Daphne du Maurier

228. “Three years of marriage,” he said, “and the dishwasher means more to your conjugal life than the double bed I’m throwing in for good measure. I warned you it wouldn’t last. The marriage, I mean, not the bed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

229. “Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.”

— Daphne du Maurier

230. “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

231. “At twenty-three it takes very little to make the spirits soar.”

— Daphne du Maurier

232. “Had I been offered all the treasures in the world I could not have turned and gone down to the cottage or the beach again. It was as though someone waited down there, in the little garden where the nettles grew. Someone who watched and listened.”

— Daphne du Maurier

233. “He laughed and shook his head. “I think you’re incorrigible.” “Good God, I hope so. Otherwise why live?”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

235. “How alive was her writing though, how full of force. Those curious, sloping letters.”

— Daphne du Maurier

236. “If the flower of my generation had not been blown to bits in the war they would have brought it back again. Now it’s too late. So few of us are left.” The bride at St. George’s.”

— Daphne du Maurier

237. “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

238. “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

239. “I had the clean new feeling that one has when the calendar is hung on the wall at the beginning of the year. January the 1st.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

241. “How many minute, invisible, intangible threads go to the making of a single human being, and what a strange jumble of hereditary impulses must have been this young Kicky and young Gyggy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

242. “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

243. “When anyone talked about beauty in that way I knew they were doing it for effect. Perhaps she wanted me to think she was intelligent. She had only to open her mouth to show me she was not.”

— Daphne du Maurier

244. “When I go, Danny, I want to go quickly, like the snuffing out of a candle.”

— Daphne du Maurier

245. “The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality. You didn’t want to live either in London or New York. The fourteenth century made an exciting, if someone gruesome, antidote to both. The trouble is that daydreams, like hallucinogenic drugs, become addictive; the more we indulge, the deeper we plunge, and then, as I said before, we end in the loony-bin.”

— Daphne du Maurier

246. “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

247. “It’s only just turned the half-hour, Madam,” said Norah in a special voice, bright and cheerful like the nurse. I wondered if Maxim’s grandmother realized that people spoke to her in this way. I wondered when they had done so for the first time, and if she had noticed then. Perhaps she had said to herself, “They think I’m getting old, how very ridiculous,” and then little by little she had become accustomed to it, and now it was as though they had always done so, it was part of her background.”

— Daphne du Maurier

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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