Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality.”

— Daphne du Maurier

309. “I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. I was a child yesterday. I had not forgotten.”

— Daphne du Maurier

310. “And looking north, inland from the Gribben, I could just make out the grey roof of a house there, set in its own grounds amongst trees. Yes, Angela and I were told. That would be Menabilly. Belongs to Dr Rashleigh, but he seldom lives there.”

— Daphne du Maurier

311. “Impossible that they should live while I was no more a part of existence.”

— Daphne du Maurier

312. “Once there had been a path across the mountains, and restlessness, and an urge to fight, and a dream of many women, and now there was a home that was my home, and peace, and relaxation, and no dreams but the reality of one woman. I did not know if it was I who had changed, or the world that had changed about me, but so it was, and I could not call back the dreams that had gone from me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

313. “I thought at first somebody was dead, but after a while I saw it was just England.”

— Daphne du Maurier

314. “No.” Monsieur Ledru mused, as though he had but half heard. Then with a start: “Oh, but most certainly not. No, it is rather a heaviness upon the mind – a weight as of lead upon brain and thoughts, while my legs are like paper under me.” Lifting his hat he passed a thin hand over his forehead. “It is such as when one cannot recall a name and goes under a burden until memory releases it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

315. “Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?’ ‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life.”

— Daphne du Maurier

316. “How right she was, I thought. What brings all of us through the years, from the first cry at birth to the sinking pulse at the end, and whom have we left behind us on the way, what ghosts, what crouching figures by what window?”

— Daphne du Maurier

317. “To him, the drug released the complex brew within the brain that served up the savored past. To me, it proved that the past was living still, that we were all participants, all witnesses. I was Roger, I was Bodrugan, I was Cain; and in being so was more truly myself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

318. “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

319. “You have never lived anywhere else,” he said, “and you are not an individual at all, you’re just a hotch-potch of every character you’ve ever acted. Your mood and your personality change with each new part that comes along. There is no such woman as Maria, there never has been. Even your children know it. And that’s why they are fascinated by you, for two days only, and then go running up to the nursery to Polly, because Polly is real, and genuine, and alive.”

— Daphne du Maurier

320. “If loving a man meant this pain and anguish and sickness, she wanted none of it. It did away with sanity and composure and made havoc of courage. She was a babbling child now when once she had been indifferent and strong.”

— Daphne du Maurier

321. “Never dance again?” said Niall. “But what would happen? What would everybody do?” “Nothing would happen,” she said. “The theater is a funny world, you know. They forget one very soon.”

— Daphne du Maurier

322. “A solitary curlew stood pensively beside the stream, watching his reflection in the water; and then his long beak darted with incredible swiftness into the reeds, stabbing at the soft mud, and, turning his head, he tucked his legs under him and rose into the air, calling his plaintive note, and streaking for the south.”

— Daphne du Maurier

323. “How alive was her writing though, how full of force. Those curious, sloping letters.”

— Daphne du Maurier

324. “If Michael Joseph of Curtis Brown tells me he doesn’t like it, or I must rewrite, he can go to hell. I can’t go back to it any more.”

— Daphne du Maurier

325. “The waiters were getting tired, and very bored. The Head Waiter came again and pushed the bill on a plate, neatly folded, under Pappy’s eyes. “What’s this?” said Pappy. “Somebody want my autograph? Who’s got a pencil? Anyone got a pencil so that I can sign my autograph?” The waiter coughed. He avoided Celia’s eyes. “It’s the bill, Pappy,” whispered Celia. “The waiter wants you to pay the bill.”

— Daphne du Maurier

326. “I’m convinced that a chap’s best chance of doing his finest work is by sticking very much to himself, and of course working very hard, and, most important of all, by talking very little about it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

327. “I wondered why I had ever despised these things, why they had once seemed pitiful and absurd. I wondered why the placidity of a home seemed necessary to me now, and why I no longer yearned for the turmoil of a ship upon the sea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

328. “In two minutes she would have forgotten all about having asked Celia for the day, and would be planning something else. If only Maria lived a little closer, Celia could have shared the responsibility of Caroline. It would only mean two children to look after instead of one. Because Pappy was a child. He needed humoring, and coaxing, and taking care of in much the same way as a child.”

— Daphne du Maurier

329. “Mander smiled: “A woman is as old as she looks, a man is as old as he feels, Sir Julius. You know the old saying?”

— Daphne du Maurier

330. “She does not know what is good for her, any more than all the so-called patriots in the country. Someone should have the nerve, and the power, to say ‘Enough.’ But they’re like a lot of sheep without a shepherd.”

— Daphne du Maurier

331. “Freada said nothing was worth doing without effort. Pappy used to say that too. Everyone said it. But when things happened easily, what was the sense in driving yourself, in sweating blood?”

— Daphne du Maurier

332. “Here was Pierre laying down the law about what the King should say to the Assembly, or what the Assembly should say to the King, and yet he could not order his own unruly boys to come down from off the hay-shocks. My mother would have done so and boxed the ears of the pair of them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

333. “I was a person of importance, I was grown up at last. That girl, who, tortured by shyness, would stand outside the sitting room door twisting a handkerchief in her hands, while from within came that babble of confused chatter so unnerving to the intruder – she had gone with the wind that afternoon. She was a poor creature, and I thought of her with scorn if I considered her at all.”

— Daphne du Maurier

334. “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

335. “We never knew the ordinary placid routine of child life, the settled home, the humdrum day by day. For if yesterday we were in London, tomorrow would be Paris, and the after-tomorrow, Rome.”

— Daphne du Maurier

336. “I sat with my hands in my lap ready to agree with what anybody said.”

— Daphne du Maurier

337. “Whether he talked or not made little difference to my mood. My only enemy was the clock on the dash-board, whose hands would move relentlessly to one o’clock.”

— Daphne du Maurier

338. “Ellen suddenly discovered how lonely she had been before he had become her companion, and how wasted those hours had been when she had sat alone with her harp, or brooding over her books. And then, no man had shown an interest in her before, or desired to talk to her. They came to the house to be amused by her mother; the plain daughter did not entertain them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

339. “I am sorry, Ellen; but I have always been plain-spoken, as you know. Living quietly as you do, you should manage very well on your allowance. But when it comes to supporting your husband as well, that is another matter. However, do not let us talk of it again. It is embarrassing to both of us. If you are ever in want, my dear, write privately to me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

340. “Living alone in Paris was very different from living in his own home with his family. In the old days there had been the familiar routine of day by day – meals at regular hours, the companionship of his schoolfellows, all the normal bustle of a happy, monotonous existence. Now he was a friendless young man, with no money and no profession, and he realised, with a little stab of disappointment, that he did not know what to do with himself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

341. “Now that the Duke of York was dead it was an ideal opportunity to break her contract. The book would have a tremendous sale in London, the publisher had intimated; everyone would talk about it, and her portrait would be published in the papers, and all the old notoriety, which, truth to tell, she had missed sadly during the years of retirement, would be hers again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

342. “So they pass out of memory and out of these pages, the figures of fifty, of a hundred years ago. Some of them were comic, and some a little tragic, and all of them had faults, but once they were living, breathing men and women like the rest of us, possessing the world that we possess to-day.”

— Daphne du Maurier

343. “He argued the course of direction during the full seventy miles of the drive. The fact that his map was eighteenth century did not fluster him.”

— Daphne du Maurier

344. “It all began to make sense. D as a child. Grandpapa – who died before Angela was born – with, D told us, a kind heart which made everyone love him, and a feeling for family that stretched to nephews, nieces, cousins and second cousins, so that any who needed help were not afraid to come to him, a man of very simple tastes unaffected by fame and fortune.”

— Daphne du Maurier

345. “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

346. “But he was quite eclipsed by one of the deputies of the Third Estate, a young lawyer called Robespierre – I wonder if Pierre has heard of him? – who suggested that the Archbishop would do better if he told his fellow clergy to join forces with the patriots who were friends to the people, and that if they wanted to help they might set an example by giving up some of their own luxurious way of living, and returning to the simple ways of the founder of their faith.”

— Daphne du Maurier

347. “He was not staring at her anymore. He was still. He had gone. The moment of truth had vanished forever, and she would never know. What had happened was Then, was already past, in some other dimension of time, and the present was Now, part of a future he could not share. This present, this future, was all blank to him, like the empty spaces in the photograph album beside the bed, waiting to be filled. Even, she thought, if he had read my mind, which he often did, he would not have cared.”

— Daphne du Maurier

348. “Heaven he would never achieve, and the hell that he had known was lost to him.”

— Daphne du Maurier

349. “Not a single well-known personality, I shall tell the management they must make a reduction on my bill. What do they think I come here for? To look at the page boys?”

— Daphne du Maurier

350. “We had been careful, ever since the September decrees, to adopt the new courtesies. Monsieur and madame were things of the past, like the old calendar. I had to remind myself also that today was the 19th Frimaire, Year II of the Republic, and no longer the 9th of December, 1793.”

— Daphne du Maurier