Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I know that age, it’s a particularly obstinate one, and a thousand bogies won’t make you fear the future. A pity we can’t change over.”

— Daphne du Maurier

252. “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

253. “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

254. “What trail of thought, confused and indirect, drove through those minds of theirs, to cloud their judgement? What waves of impulse swept about their being, moving them to anger and withdrawal, or else to sudden generosity? We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

255. “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

256. “You know, when I die, the money goes to Ellen,’ she told Louis one day, and he had not said much; he looked rather vague, as though money was something he never touched; but a week or so later Ellen came into the room very flushed and excited and said that Louis-Mathurin had proposed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

257. “I had not realised until then that grown-up people could be unhappy, that they could cry. I did not want to think about it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

258. “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

259. “But ‘I read also’ intensified, then and during the following year, with a lot of Scott, a lot of Thackeray, and R. L. Stevenson never far away.”

— Daphne du Maurier

260. “Sir,’ or whatever one does say to God, ‘here I am, Maria, and I am the lowest form of life,’ that would be honest. And honesty counts for something, doesn’t it?” “One doesn’t know,” said Niall. “That’s the frightful thing. One just does not know what goes down well with God. He may think honesty is a form of bragging.” “In that case I’m sunk,” said Maria. “I think you’re sunk, anyway,” said Niall.”

— Daphne du Maurier

261. “Charles was nowhere to be seen. Maria had to go to look for him. Celia’s anxiety mounted. Pappy would never hang on until after six. He was like a baby with a bottle. He had to keep to his regular time for his whiskey or his whole system became disorganized.”

— Daphne du Maurier

262. “He had been dedicated to science since his first birthday, and Louis-Mathurin would hear of no other career for his eldest son. Kicky was seventeen on the sixth of March, and did not look much like a prospective scientist.”

— Daphne du Maurier

263. “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

264. “She put the steaming mutton down in front and he smacked his lips ‘they taught you something where you came from, anyway,’ he said. ‘I always say there’s two things women ought to do by instinct, and cookin’s one of ’em.”

— Daphne du Maurier

265. “It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.”

— Daphne du Maurier

266. “Supposing you are caught in Launceston with Mr. Bassat’s pony? You would look a fool then, wouldn’t you? And so would I, if they clapped me into prison alongside of you.” “No one’s going to catch me; not yet awhile, anyway. Take a risk, Mary; don’t you like excitement, that you’re so careful of your own skin? They must breed you soft down Helford way.” She rose like a fish to his bait.”

— Daphne du Maurier

267. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “I’m fond of you, Mary; you’ve got sense, and you’ve got pluck; you’d make a good companion to a man. They ought to have made you a boy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

269. “Think of the unkind things we have forgotten,” said Niall. “Those are the ones that will be totted up against us. I sometimes wake up in the early morning and go quite cold thinking of all the things I must have done and can’t remember.” “Pappy must have taught you that,” said Celia. “Pappy had a fearful theory that when we die we go to a theater, and we sit down and see the whole of our lives re-acted before us. And nothing is omitted. Not one single, sordid detail. We have to watch it all.”

— Daphne du Maurier

270. “No doubt it was the truth, or so distorted in her mind that, to her, it became so.”

— Daphne du Maurier

271. “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

272. “When I lie I like to base the lie on a foundation of fact, for it appeases not only conscience but a sense of justice.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

274. “Kicky put the ten pounds back in the envelope. It was really very good of mamma. All she had in the world was that rather inadequate but so eagerly expected little dividend every quarter. He was not even sure where it came from – something to do with his grandmother who had died at Boulogne.”

— Daphne du Maurier

275. “It seemed strange that things could still be done to me after I was dead, that my body would perhaps be found and handled by people I should never know, that really a little life would go on about me which I should never feel.”

— Daphne du Maurier

276. “His best friends were Tom Armstrong, who was two years older than himself and had been painting now for several years, and a Scotsman, Lamont, with a dry sense of humour and a twinkling eye. There was Rowley, too, a giant of wonderful physique and the tender heart of a child, moved to tremendous rage if anyone insulted his friends; Poynter, and Aleco Ionides, and the sinister, slightly crazy Jimmy Whistler, who wore his dark curls long and was a great poseur, even in those days.”

— Daphne du Maurier

277. “Oh, mamma dearest, don’t let’s look for the clouds till they are on us,’ he said in despair. ‘Things must come all right for us in the end. As long as my eye does not fail me we need none of us starve.”

— Daphne du Maurier

278. “So dawned family interest, family pride, which was something quite other than clapping from a box in Wyndham’s Theatre when the curtain went up and D was standing there, smiling, bowing his head, looking from right to left and then up to the gallery, which happened at the end of the play. This was just part of something I had always known; it had nothing to do with us children but belonged to the audience, the people down there and all around, whom we should never know, who were not ‘us’.”

— Daphne du Maurier

279. “So much laughter, so much gaiety, up in the wards there with the wounded men, and the same below, in the pillared hall, and out in the grounds too, where the more mobile would come rabbiting. Once only did I realise how the war must have touched them, and this was when a fresh entry of wounded came by ambulance to the entrance in the great hall.”

— Daphne du Maurier

280. “Some inner sense warned them that in their ignorance dwelt security, a happiness that was never wild, never triumphant, but peaceful and silent.”

— Daphne du Maurier

281. “How pleasant,′ Dona said, peeling her fruit; ’the rest of us can only run away from time to time, and however much we pretend to be free, we know it is only for a little while – our hands and our feet are tied.”

— Daphne du Maurier

282. “The word lingered in the air once I had uttered it, dancing before me, and because he received it silently, making no comment, the word magnified itself into something heinous and appalling, a forbidden word, unnatural to the tongue. And I could not call it back, it could never be unsaid.”

— Daphne du Maurier

283. “When there’s a sudden silence, and nobody speaks, it means there’s an angel in the room, so.”

— Daphne du Maurier

284. “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

285. “How lovely it was to be alone again. No, I did not mean that. It was disloyal, wicked. It was not what I meant. Maxim was my life and my world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

286. “Mary’s mother turned to her and said, “There’s something of me gone in the grave with poor Nell, Mary. I don’t know whether it’s my faith or what it is, but my heart feels tired and I can’t go on anymore.”

— Daphne du Maurier

287. “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

288. “Robert rather lost his head, and kept forgetting things, napkins at lunch, and handing vegetables. He wore a harassed expression, like someone who has got to catch a train.”

— Daphne du Maurier

289. “Naturally, at the outbreak of the Revolution he followed the example of the clergy and the aristocracy and emigrated to England with his young bride, my mother, and suffered much penury in consequence. His full name was Robert-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, and he died tragically and suddenly in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, on returning to France in the hopes of restoring the family fortunes.”

— Daphne du Maurier

290. “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

291. “In 1994, Flavia published a biography of her mother, picking up the story where Myself When Young leaves off – the marriage to Tommy Browning and subsequent family life. The biography concludes with a celebration of the scattering of her mother’s ashes over the Cornish cliffs, and a belief that she has joined her dead husband in a boat sailing them into infinity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

292. “The restlessness has gone, the indecision and also the great heights of exultation, the strange depths of desolation. I am secure now, and certain of myself. There is peace and contentment.”

— Daphne du Maurier

293. “The happy thing about success was that it meant he could provide for his children and his grandchildren, and they would none of them know want and dire poverty as he had done. He would take care that there would be enough for all of them when he died – enough for distant cousins and little grand-nephews and the straggling remnants of the Busson clan.”

— Daphne du Maurier

294. “But the point is this, monsieur,” explained the patron, “the reason why madame complains of you, is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious.”

— Daphne du Maurier

295. “She walked briskly, with the quick step of one who did not suffer, or perhaps refused to suffer, any of the inconveniences of old age;.”

— Daphne du Maurier

296. “But the people enjoy watching the dog,” he said swiftly, trying to divert Charles. “That’s why they go to the circus, for distraction. Maria supplies the same drug in the theater, and I give it in large doses to all the errand-boys who whistle my songs. I think you’ve got hold of the wrong word. We’re pedlars, hawking our wares – not parasites.”

— Daphne du Maurier

297. “I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

298. “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

299. “Trust you? Good God, of course I trust you. It’s you who won’t trust me, you damned little fool.‘” He laughed silently, and bent down to her, putting his arms round her, and he kissed her then as he had kissed her in Launceston, but deliberately now, with anger and exasperation. “Play your own game by yourself, then, and leave me to play mine,” he told her. ‘If you must be a boy, I can’t stop you, but for the sake of your face, which I have kissed, and shall kiss again, keep away from danger.”

— Daphne du Maurier

300. “So much for women’s value in other days. Goods reared for purchase, then bought and sold in the market-place, or rather manor. Small wonder that, their duty done, they looked round for consolation, either by taking a lover or by playing an active part in the bargaining over their own daughters and sons.”

— Daphne du Maurier