Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

315. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

317. “Ambrose used to say to me in Florence that it was worth the tedium of visitors to experience the pleasure of their going.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

320. “I found this hardly comforting, and wondered if there was not some virtue in the quality of insincerity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

321. “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

322. “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

323. “Everything she wrote on these delicate matters was tactful – the truth was between the lines – but many of her father’s contemporaries were outraged on his behalf and regarded what had been written as a betrayal.”

— Daphne du Maurier

324. “My aunt, who disapproved of gaiety on principle, made a moue of disdain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

325. “Perhaps losing my first child had made me hard. Nothing Robert could say or do would ever again surprise me. If he chose to leave us this way, although my heart yearned after him it was his choice, not ours.”

— Daphne du Maurier

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

330. “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

331. “Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

332. “I have no great opinion of the human race. It is just as well, now and again, that we have wars, so that men know what it is to suffer pain. One day they will exterminate themselves, as they have exterminated the rabbits. So much the better. The world will be peaceful again, with nothing left but the forest over there, and the soil.”

— Daphne du Maurier

333. “All this awaited me in the suite, while he, once he had left me at the hotel, would go away somewhere alone, towards the sea perhaps, feel the wind on his cheek, follow the sun; and it might happen that he would lose himself in those memories that I knew nothing of, that I could not share, he would wander down the years that were gone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “The bells ceased and died away, yet the echo seemed to sound still in my ears, solemn, sonorous, tolling not for my mission, insignificant and small, nor for the lives of the people in the streets, but for the souls of men and women long since dead, and for eternity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

338. “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

339. “Friendship and duty are two separate things,” he said, “and I put duty first. You are another generation, you wouldn’t understand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

340. “This astonished us as children, for we grew up beside the charcoal burners, called them by their Christian names, watched them at work, visited them in their log huts when they were ill; but to my mother, the bailiff’s daughter from St. Christophe, gently nurtured, educated and well spoken, the rude shouts of these wild men of the woods at midnight must have sounded like devils in hell.”

— Daphne du Maurier

341. “Children’s tears are very near the surface, and come at the first crisis.”

— Daphne du Maurier

342. “They were ageless, they were sexless, they were neither male nor female, old or young, but the beauty of their faces, and of their bodies too, was more stirring and exciting than anything I had ever seen or known, and with a sudden longing I wanted to be one of them, to be dressed as they were dressed, to love as they must love, to laugh and worship and be silent.”

— Daphne du Maurier

343. “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

344. “I did not know what to answer, because it would be too sudden and too direct, but I knew in my heart that what I wanted was everything that could be between a woman and a man; not at first, of course, but later, when we had found our other mountain, or our wilderness, or wherever it was we might go to hide ourselves from the world. There was no need to rehearse all that now. The point was that I was prepared to follow her anywhere if she would let me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

345. “Niall never really knew which; but he used to lie in bed until she returned in the middle of the day, and he read every one of the works of Maupassant, the book in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other.”

— Daphne du Maurier

346. “At twenty-six she had held her little world between her ruthless, exquisite fingers, and here was her grandson, at the same age, launching himself into the problematical future, in which he was to win fame by satirising the same society she had led by the ears at the beginning of the century.”

— Daphne du Maurier

347. “Meantime, the Declaration of the Rights of Man made all men equal, if it did not make them brothers, and within a week of its passing into law there were riots in Le Mans, and disturbances in Paris too, with the price of bread as high as it had been before, and unemployment rife. Bakers were blamed in every city for charging too dearly for their four-pound loaf, and they in turn put the blame upon the grain merchants; all men were at fault save those who leveled the accusations.”

— Daphne du Maurier

348. “Charles said, “I haven’t looked at the Acrostic. A word of nine letters in the crossword caught my attention.” “Oh, what was that?” “An invertebrate animal preying upon the body of another animal.” Niall struck the first chord on the piano. “A parasite,” he said.”

— Daphne du Maurier

349. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier