Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

209. “Fashions change so quickly nowadays they may even have altered by the time you get upstairs.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

211. “Everything she wrote on these delicate matters was tactful – the truth was between the lines – but many of her father’s contemporaries were outraged on his behalf and regarded what had been written as a betrayal.”

— Daphne du Maurier

212. “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

213. “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

214. “My aunt, who disapproved of gaiety on principle, made a moue of disdain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

215. “Perhaps losing my first child had made me hard. Nothing Robert could say or do would ever again surprise me. If he chose to leave us this way, although my heart yearned after him it was his choice, not ours.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “In November, Foy Quiller-Couch and I went on another riding expedition, this time to Bodmin moors, putting up at the wayside hostelry, Jamaica Inn.”

— Daphne du Maurier

221. “It was really very lucky for Kicky and Gyggy and little Isabella, and all the future generations; that their kind grandmamma had succeeded so well in her profession that she was able to live in honourable retirement and keep them all clothed and fed. But for her generosity, and the allowance she paid her daughter, the Busson du Mauriers would have fared very ill indeed. It is even doubtful whether they would have survived at all.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

223. “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

224. “If I possessed the world, you should have it also.”

— Daphne du Maurier

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “I had become like a prisoner in chains, and the dungeon was deep.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

230. “Mary wondered how many years Aunt Patience had kept that knowledge to herself in an agony of silence. No one would ever know how greatly she had suffered. Wherever she should go in the future, the pain of that knowledge would go with her. It could never leave her alone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

231. “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

232. “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

233. “She realized for the first time that aversion and attraction ran side by side; that the boundary-line was thin between them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

234. “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

235. “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

236. “What a time you’ve been. You can’t afford to dream this morning, you know, there’s too much to be done.”

— Daphne du Maurier

237. “I wrote on the birthday itself, ’and as for being twenty-one, I’ll leave it at that. I can’t see that years make any difference, or days, or hours, it’s things that happen to one that matter. I shan’t look back. No guttering candles and dripping wicks for me. When I go let me go quickly, still a bright flame, no flickering! Meanwhile Adams and I celebrated my majority by taking Annabelle Lee out to sea and catching 13 pollock, which was a good start for the boat.”

— Daphne du Maurier

238. “There was no yesterday and no tomorrow; fear had been slung aside, and shame forgotten. We were all together – Pappy and Mama; Maria and Niall and Celia – we were all happy, with so many people looking at us, we were all enjoying ourselves. It was a game that we played, a game that we understood. We were the Delaneys. And we were giving a party.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

244. “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

245. “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

246. “Slaughter on a scale far greater than any attempted by the Paris mob was the portion of those village patriots who dared to resist them. Women and children were not spared, men were thrown, while still alive, into ditches piled high with corpses. Clergy who had sworn the oath to the Constitution were tied to horses and dragged on the dusty roads to a terrible death.”

— Daphne du Maurier

247. “Could time be all-dimensional – yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition? Perhaps.”

— Daphne du Maurier

248. “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

249. “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

250. “There was a garden at the back, a delight to the children, and a green gate in the wall that led to a private avenue, all tangled undergrowth and mystery. And away behind this was the Bois itself, the enchanted forest, stretching surely to eternity, thought the children; a paradise with no beginning and no end. It was these years in Passy, between 1842 and 1847, that Kicky was to describe nearly fifty years later in Peter Ibbetson.”

— Daphne du Maurier