Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “No, I’m thinking of my conscience and of Almighty God; and though I’ll face any man in a fair fight, and take punishment if need be, when it comes to the killing of innocent folk, and maybe women and children among them, that’s going straight to hell, Joss Merlyn, and you know it as well as I do.”

— Daphne du Maurier

252. “The people don’t want to be understood, it would spoil their sense of injustice. They revel in their wrongs.”

— Daphne du Maurier

253. “However demanding Pappy may have been, however tiring, however petulant, he was, in the true and deepest sense, her refuge. He shielded her from action. His was the cloak that covered her. She need not go out into the world, she need not struggle, need not face the things that other people face – because she looked after Pappy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

254. “Today, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one lightly and are soon forgotten, but then – how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.”

— Daphne du Maurier

255. “You could stoop down and pick a fallen petal, crush it between your fingers, and you had there, in the hollow of your hand, the essence of a thousand scents, unbearable and sweet.”

— Daphne du Maurier

256. “I looked on her profile. She was always a stranger, thus. Those neat clipped features on a coin. Dark and withdrawn, a foreign woman standing in a doorway, a shawl about her head, her hand outstretched. But full-face, when she smiled, a stranger never. The Rachel that I knew, that I had loved.”

— Daphne du Maurier

257. “We’re off, Truda,” called Mama. “If you bring the children along after the interval it will be time enough.” She stood for a moment in the doorway, cool and detached, and she was dragging long white gloves onto her hands. Her smooth dark hair was parted in the middle, as always, with a low knot in the nape of her neck. To-night she wore the collar of pearls round her neck, because of the party afterwards, and pearl earrings.”

— Daphne du Maurier

258. “There are few strains more intolerable in life than waiting for the arrival of unwelcome guests.”

— Daphne du Maurier

259. “This is ours for the moment, but no more. While we are in it we bring it life. When we have gone it no longer exists, it fades into anonymity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

260. “But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood.”

— Daphne du Maurier

261. “She had grown older in four days, and the face that looked back at her from the spotted, cracked mirror was drawn and tired. There were dark rings beneath her eyes, and little hollows in her cheeks. Sleep came late to her at night, and she had no appetite for food. For the first time in her life she saw a resemblance between herself and her Aunt Patience.”

— Daphne du Maurier

262. “Original proposals were much better. More genuine. Not like other people. Not like younger men who talked non sense probably not meaning half they said. Not like younger men being very incoherent, very passionate, swearing impossibilities.”

— Daphne du Maurier

263. “There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed, sitting here, alive and in my own home, anymore than poor Tom Jenkyn could, swinging in his chains.”

— Daphne du Maurier

264. “As an eavesdropper in time my role was passive, without commitment or responsibility. I could move about in their world unwatched, knowing that whatever happened I could do nothing to prevent it – comedy, tragedy, or farce – whereas in my twentieth century existence I must take my share in shaping my own future and that of my family.”

— Daphne du Maurier

265. “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

266. “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

267. “Perhaps,” thought Robin, “the soldiers didn’t actually mock Jesus at all. It was just a game, which they let him join in. He might even have thrown dice with them. The crown and the purple robe were just dressing-up. It was the Romans’ idea of fun. I don’t believe when a prisoner is condemned to death the people guarding him are beastly. They try and make the time go quickly, because they feel sorry for him.”

— Daphne du Maurier

268. “The car sped along. She kept her foot permanently on the accelerator, and took every corner at an acute angle. Two motorists we passed looked out of their windows outraged as she swept by, and one pedestrian in a lane waved his stick at her. I felt rather hot for her. She did not seem to notice though. I crouched lower in my seat.”

— Daphne du Maurier

269. “You ought to take more exercise, if you’re inclined to have a liver. Play golf.”

— Daphne du Maurier

270. “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

271. “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

272. “The system might one day change, but human nature remained the same, and there were always people who profited at the expense of others.”

— Daphne du Maurier

273. “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

274. “No, it was done with and finished. Escape was a thing of yesterday.”

— Daphne du Maurier

275. “This is what it means to be purged. A burden lifted. Emptiness instead.”

— Daphne du Maurier

276. “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

277. “The spaniel came up to me, sniffing at my legs, and I bent down and stroked his ears. “Well, Micky,” I said, “you surely remember me? Poor old Micky, good old Micky.” “Micky has got very fat,” said my mother. “Yes,” I said. “Micky is fond of his food,” said Grey. There was another pause and I went on stroking the spaniel’s ears.”

— Daphne du Maurier

278. “Soon we won’t be children anymore. We shall be like Them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

279. “The order never varies. Two slices of bread-and-butter each, and China tea. What a hide-bound couple we must seem, clinging to custom because we did so in England. Here, on this clean balcony, white and impersonal with centuries of sun, I think of half-past-four at Manderley, and the table drawn before the library fire. The door flung open, punctual to the minute, and the performance, never-varying, of the laying of the tea, the silver tray, the kettle, the snowy cloth.”

— Daphne du Maurier

280. “However grim and hateful was this new country, however barren and untilled, with Jamaica Inn standing alone upon the hill as a buffer to the four winds, there was a challenge in the air that spurred Mary Yellan to adventure. It stung her, bringing color to her cheeks and a sparkle to her eyes; it played with her hair, blowing it about her face; and as she breathed deep she drew it through her nostrils and into her lungs, more quenching and sweeter than a draft of cider.”

— Daphne du Maurier

281. “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

282. “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

283. “To me, lonely, anxious, and a survivor of too many emotional shipwrecks, he came almost as a savior, as an answer to prayer. To be strong as he was, and tender too, lacking all personal conceit, I had not met with that. I know what he was to me. But I to him...”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

285. “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

286. “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

287. “This time the man confessed that there was slight detachment of the retina, and that Kicky must give up all thought of working for several months, and devote himself to the cure. He must have treatment at least once a week, continue with the ordinary bathing and poulticing at home, and put himself on a diet. He must, in fact, resign himself to being more or less of an invalid for the immediate future.”

— Daphne du Maurier

288. “They say that when we sleep our sub-conscious selves are revealed, our hidden thoughts and desires are written plain upon our features and our bodies like the tracings of rivers on a map; and no one reads them but the darkness.”

— Daphne du Maurier

289. “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

290. “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

291. “She turned round and faced me, smiling, one hand in her pocket, the other holding her cigarette.”

— Daphne du Maurier

292. “They were flung open, and he could hear the applause in the far distance. He could not judge the sound. It always seemed to him the same from any theater. A steady, breaking sound. A sort of roar. It had always sounded the same for as far back as he could remember.”

— Daphne du Maurier

293. “I am considered silly, selfish and incredible by all concerned. No use in explaining. I prefer to live happily in discomfort here in beloved Fowey to living comfortably, query, and discontentedly in indifferent Hampstead. That’s all. I’m used to being alone. Why fuss? Why struggle? It’s funny that no one seems really to understand my craving for solitude, that I am sincerely, and without posing, happiest when alone. It’s my natural state.”

— Daphne du Maurier

294. “Jamaica Inn stands today, hospitable and kindly, a temperance house on the twenty-mile road between Bodmin and Launceston. In the following story of adventure I have pictured it as it might have been over a hundred and twenty years ago; and although existing place-names figure in the pages, the characters and events described are entirely imaginary. Daphne du Maurier Bodinnick-by-Fowey October 1935.”

— Daphne du Maurier

295. “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

296. “I’ll not show fear before Joss Merlyn or any man,” she said, “and, to prove it, I will go down now, in the dark passage, and take a look at them in the bar, and if he kills me it will be my own fault.”

— Daphne du Maurier

297. “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

298. “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

299. “She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment.”

— Daphne du Maurier

300. “No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be.”

— Daphne du Maurier