Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “The famous studio in Trilby, shared by the three friends – Taffy, the Laird, and Little Billee – really existed in the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, and was No. 53. Tom Armstrong, Poynter, Lamont, and Kicky took possession of it on New Year’s Day, 1857.”

— Daphne du Maurier

218. “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

219. “There was no other sound except the husky wheezing of the clock in the hall and the sudden whirring note preparatory to the strike. It rang the hour – three o’clock – and then ticked on, choking and gasping like a dying man who cannot catch his breath.”

— Daphne du Maurier

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “The smell of coffee, white dust, tobacco and burnt bread, flowers with a fragrance of wine, and the crimson fruit, soft and overripe. A girl looking over her bare shoulder, with a flash of a smile, gold ear-rings showing from thick black hair brushed away from her face, long arms, a cigarette between her lips. Night like a great dark blanket, voices murmuring at a street corner, the air warm with tired flowers, and a hum from the sea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

225. “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

226. “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

227. “He did not notice, every day, as I did, the blind gaze of the old dog in its basket in the library, who lifted its head when it heard my footstep, the footstep of a woman, and sniffing the air drooped its head again, because I was not the one she sought.”

— Daphne du Maurier

228. “Aunt Patience, you’re talking nonsense. What is the use of an inn that cannot give an honest traveler a bed for the night? For what other purpose was it built? And how do you live, if you have no custom?”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

230. “I thought to find it in the Christian Church, but the dogma sickened me, and the whole foundation is built upon a fairy-tale. Christ Himself is a figurehead, a puppet thing created by man himself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

231. “A master glass-maker must accustom himself to moving on. In old days they had always been wanderers, going from one forest to another, settling for a few years only.”

— Daphne du Maurier

232. “The house was large, redbricked, and gabled. Late Victorian I supposed. Not an attractive house. I could tell in a glance it was the sort of house that was aggressively well-kept by a big staff. And all for one old lady who was nearly blind.”

— Daphne du Maurier

233. “You forget, those things were easy for me. I belonged to both of them.” Niall pushed his cup back on the tray. “What a bloody thing to say,” he said, and he got up and lit another cigarette.”

— Daphne du Maurier

234. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier