Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “If I possessed the world, you should have it also.”

— Daphne du Maurier

252. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

254. “The proprietor bowed, and walked with him to the entrance. ‘In Venice the whole world meets,’ he said smiling. ‘It is possible the signore will find his friends tonight. Arrivederci, signore.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

256. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

258. “The glass world was unique, a law unto itself. It had its own rules and customs, and a separate language too, handed down not only from father to son but from master to apprentice, instituted heaven knows how many centuries ago wherever the glass-makers settled – in Normandy, in Lorraine, by the Loire – but always, naturally, by forests, for wood was the glass foundry’s food, the mainstay of its existence.”

— Daphne du Maurier

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

263. “I don’t think there is any necessity to bring Inspector Welch into the affair – yet,” said Colonel Julyan. His voice was different, harsher. I did not like the way he used the word, “yet.” Why must he use it at all? I did not like it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “She had beauty that endured, and a smile that was not forgotten. Somewhere her voice still lingered, and the memory of her words.”

— Daphne du Maurier

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

272. “The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow.”

— Daphne du Maurier

273. “Mournful, mournful. I wanted to be alone, but the others would laugh and talk. Always the past, just out of reach, waiting to be recaptured. Why did I feel so sad thinking of a past I had never known?”

— Daphne du Maurier

274. “It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.”

— Daphne du Maurier

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “Joss Merlyn shouted at the top of his voice, and the noise was deafening. Mary did not fear him like this; the whole thing was bluster and show; it was when he lowered his voice and whispered that she knew him to be deadly. For all his thunder he was frightened; she could see that; and his confidence was rudely shaken.”

— Daphne du Maurier

282. “Here is Tom Jenkyns, honest and dull, except when he drank too much. It’s true that 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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “Carry must have been the germ that produced the ultimate Trilby, there can be no two opinions about it; she had the same camaraderie, the same boyish attraction, the same funny shy reserve. Kicky absorbed her, without realising it, and absorbed the game of mesmerising at the same time, so that the two things combined and became one at the back of his mind. He forgot all about them for nearly forty years – and then he wrote Trilby and made a fortune at sixty.”

— Daphne du Maurier

295. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

297. “Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier