Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “Richard turned and saw me. And as he looked at me it was as if my whole heart moved over in my body and was mine no longer.”

— Daphne du Maurier

302. “You have only to look at his eyes. He’s still in hell...”

— Daphne du Maurier

303. “I am probably a dull man. Emotionally I have had no complications. I was engaged to a pretty girl, a neighbor, when I was twenty-five, but she married somebody else. It hurt at the time, but the wound healed in less than a year. One fault, if fault it is, I have always had, which perhaps accounts for my hitherto monotonous life. This is an aversion to becoming involved with people. Friends I possess, but at a distance. Once involved, trouble occurs, and too often disaster follows.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

305. “The other Dona was dead too, and this woman who had taken her place was someone who lived with greater intensity, with greater depth, bringing to every thought and every action a new richness of feeling, and an appreciation, half sensuous in its quality, of all the little things that came to make her day.”

— Daphne du Maurier

306. “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

307. “The man would not commit himself. “I don’t want to make trouble,” he repeated, “and I don’t know anything. It’s only what people say. Respectable folk don’t go to Jamaica anymore. That’s all I know. In the old days we used to water the horses there, and feed them, and go in for a bit of a bite and drink. But we don’t stop there anymore. We whip the horses past and wait for nothing, not till we get to Five Lanes, and then we don’t bide long.”

— Daphne du Maurier

308. “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

309. “Tom Jeckell, Kicky’s friend of Pentonville days, was now a budding architect, and resumed his former friendship, and Kicky began to consider himself one of the luckiest fellows in the world to possess so many affectionate friends.”

— Daphne du Maurier

310. “She is like a child playing at houses,” whispered my mother. “What I ask myself is this – where will it all end?”

— Daphne du Maurier

311. “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

312. “I do lie about,” she said, “from time to time. The trouble is I go off everyone so quickly. I soon get bored.” “Bored with the things they say? Or with the things they do?” “With the things they do. I never listen to the things they say.”

— Daphne du Maurier

313. “Ellen turned away from them impatiently, and went to the rail once again. Her mother’s friends were all the same – affected and insincere, their conversation a continual mockery of people and things. The poor family on the lower deck had no claim upon their sympathy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

314. “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

315. “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

316. “The only timid one of the trio was the nameless heroine in Rebecca, and she found strength of purpose when she discovered that her husband Maxim truly loved her, and had never cared for his first wife Rebecca.”

— Daphne du Maurier

317. “Experience, Major Dodd, has long informed me that no man ever expresses admiration unless he wants something out of the person admired.” “That’s a very cynical view.” “I’m a cynical woman.”

— Daphne du Maurier

318. “H’mph,” growled the squire, “that’s a damned nuisance. I wanted a word or two with Mr. Joss Merlyn. Now look here, my good woman, your precious husband may have bought Jamaica Inn behind my back, in his blackguardly fashion, and we’ll not go into that again now, but one thing I won’t stand for, and that’s having all my land hereabouts made a byword for everything that’s damnable and dishonest round the countryside.”

— Daphne du Maurier

319. “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

320. “He spent much of his time pottering in the drawing-room and looking through old letters of Guy’s, old sketches of Papa’s. It was as though he wanted to soak himself in the past and shut away the present and the future.”

— Daphne du Maurier

321. “I have asked your uncle, and he does not object, he says, if you are quiet-spoken and not a talker, and will give help when needed. He cannot give you money, or feed you for nothing, as you will understand. He will expect your help in the bar, in return for your board and lodging.”

— Daphne du Maurier

322. “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

323. “Although there was nothing to do there, no one to play with, somehow it did not matter, I was happy, and at peace. Billy would be up in her bedroom writing letters – she had so many friends, she was always writing letters – she had so many friends, she was always writing letters – or she would talk to her pekinese dog Ching, which she adored, and which tried to bite her every time she groomed him.”

— Daphne du Maurier

324. “Bread was their main fare – they could not afford meat – and a man earning at the rate of one livre or twenty sous a day, with a hungry family to feed, paid half his wages on bread alone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

325. “We don’t need vows, you and I’, he said, ’nor gold nor metal. What we are to each other lasts to the grave and beyond.”

— Daphne du Maurier

326. “This house sheltered us, we spoke, we lived within those walls. That was yesterday.”

— Daphne du Maurier

327. “What was John-Henry but the outcome of the years?”

— Daphne du Maurier

328. “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

329. “I wrote better at fifteen than I do now,’ I grumbled in the diary, after glancing through some scraps that had not been lost. ‘Perhaps if I changed from fiction to sociology I should do better. A treatise on civilisation? It might be good practice for style if nothing else.”

— Daphne du Maurier

330. “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

331. “Maria stepped out of the telephone box. A policeman at the corner was watching her. Caroline was still crying. Maria turned and pushed the pram in the opposite direction from the policeman. You never knew. It might be against the law to leave a child to cry.”

— Daphne du Maurier

332. “Why, no doubt there is a risk, just as every day in every man’s life he risks breaking his neck when he steps outside his door.”

— Daphne du Maurier

333. “She laughed because she must, and because he made her;.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

335. “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

336. “He was my secret property. Preserved for me alone...”

— Daphne du Maurier

337. “The rest of the little party had moved away, embarrassed, distressed, unwilling witnesses of what appeared to be an excess of faith.”

— Daphne du Maurier

338. “The art of provocation was unknown to me, and I would sit with his map upon my lap, the wind blowing my dull, lanky hair, happy in his silence yet eager for his words.”

— Daphne du Maurier

339. “Her uncle had ridden away on the moors somewhere, and a sense of freedom possessed her whenever he was gone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

340. “I love you so much’ he whispered. ‘So much.”

— Daphne du Maurier

341. “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

342. “I will tell you how I sought refuge from myself in Christianity and found it to be built upon hatred and jealousy, and greed – all the man-made attributes of civilization, while the old pagan barbarism was naked and clean.”

— Daphne du Maurier

343. “It was some personal friend of the landlord’s, who had no wish to meddle in his evening’s business, and would not show himself even to the landlord’s wife.”

— Daphne du Maurier

344. “I scanned the criticisms of recent books to see if there were any that resembled mine. I resented them all; it seemed to me too many people wrote in England, too many people had ideas.”

— Daphne du Maurier

345. “I kept thinking of the first time, nearly ten months before, on that Sunday in September. I had been irritated by Louise that morning, sitting so stiff and proud, and had neglected her from that day forward. She had not wavered, but had stayed my friend.”

— Daphne du Maurier

346. “It seemed strange that life must go on without our need for it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

348. “I would forget my own beating heart, my own trembling body, my own sense of inexpiable degradation. I got up and started to throw off my things. Then the door opened and Jake came into the cabin. I did not want to look at him at first. I turned my back and fumbled with the tap of the basin. He did not say anything either. I whistled a tune under my breath. I wished he had been drunk, or laughing, or cursing, or in some way dragging himself down to my level.”

— Daphne du Maurier

349. “This, dear God, was his contribution to the universe. Take it or leave it. Not for Niall the joys of Paradise, perhaps; but at least not the pangs of Purgatory. A small place, possibly, outside the Golden Gates.”

— Daphne du Maurier

350. “The great man made all sorts of tests with mysterious instruments, and finally told him there was very little wrong, merely a congestion of the retina, and gave him some drops for use every night and morning, and told him to go away for a few weeks to the sea, and he would be well by the end of the month.”

— Daphne du Maurier