Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The thing had been a tragedy, but tragedies become less poignant as the months pass.”

— Daphne du Maurier

352. “Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us.”

— Daphne du Maurier

353. “Men and women were like the animals on the farm at Helford, she supposed; there was a common law of attraction for all living things, some similarity of skin or touch, and they would go to one another. This was no choice made with the mind.”

— Daphne du Maurier

354. “Nat thought to himself that “they” were no doubt considering the problem at that very moment, but whatever “they” decided to do in London and the big cities would not help the people here, three hundred miles away. Each householder must look after his own.”

— Daphne du Maurier

355. “Had I been offered all the treasures in the world I could not have turned and gone down to the cottage or the beach again. It was as though someone waited down there, in the little garden where the nettles grew. Someone who watched and listened.”

— Daphne du Maurier

356. “How am I to know?” said Maria. “People never tell one the truth, not the real truth. It may be all right tonight, and the notices may be good, and everybody be nice – but I shan’t really know.” “You’ll know all right,” he said, “here.” And he tapped his chest. “Inside,” he said. “I feel it’s all wrong to be nervous,” said Maria. “I feel it’s lack of confidence. One ought to go right ahead, never minding.”

— Daphne du Maurier

357. “Now, looking about me in the desolation and the splendour, I knew what I had lacked all these years. I forgot my fellow travellers, forgot the grey fuselage of the crippled ’plane – an anachronism, surely, amid the wilderness of centuries – and forgot too my grey hair, my heavy frame, and all the burden of my five-and-fifty years. I was a boy again, hopeful, eager, seeking an answer to eternity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

358. “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

359. “Mary could see that her aunt was eager to speak of things unconnected with her present life; she seemed afraid of any questions, so Mary spared her, and plunged into a description of the last years at Helford, the strain of the bad times, and her mother’s illness and death.”

— Daphne du Maurier

360. “Angela and Jeanne were content with their lives. Why did I have to be different? We three got on so well, we never quarrelled, and could discuss every subject under the sun; yet they had no desire to break away, as I did.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

362. “All attempts on the part of her son to dissuade her were useless. She remained firm. “If this man is an impostor I shall know it directly I set eyes on him,” she said. “If not, then I shall have done my duty.”

— Daphne du Maurier

363. “Though Thomas liked to think he had his own way over things, it was generally Janet who had the last say in the matter. She would fling a word at her husband and no more, and he would go off to his work with an uneasy feeling at the back of his mind that she had won. He called it “giving in to Janie,” but it was more than that, it was unconscious subservience to a quieter but stronger personality than his own.”

— Daphne du Maurier

364. “Grey put me up for his club. I dine there most evenings. Fellows there have been extraordinarily kind. I go out often, I know many people. Sometimes I remember what Jake said about me being successful one day. I suppose it will come true. It’s all very different, of course, from what I dreamed. But then dreams are apart from the business of living; they are things we shed from us gently as we grow older.”

— Daphne du Maurier

365. “Until the moment of that dismissal with its reason given, he had received out of anywhere – or was it out of nowhere in the morning – that love must suffer for loving; that, the deeper planted, the more it must suffer, in that all true passion of love at its highest force inevitably ends in tragedy: that no story of love between man and woman at its highest could ever come but to a tragic end; that no ending but disillusion can be invented for the illusion which is more than half of such love;.”

— Daphne du Maurier

366. “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

367. “But Part Four would not be easy. The last member of the four generations, Jane Slade’s great-granddaughter Jennifer, was going to be rather tiresome. I was not sure what to do with her. Could it be that I had lost interest in the whole story?”

— Daphne du Maurier

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “She sipped her glass of water, crooking her finger, smiling at Maria. I can’t make up my mind, thought Niall, whether Polly is a criminal, cunning and dangerous, ripe for the Old Bailey; or just so bloody stupid that it would be kindness to wring her neck and spare the world more pain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

372. “When he is irritable she will soothe him. When he is tired she will rest him. When he is gay she will join in his gaiety, and when he is solemn she will be solemn too.”

— Daphne du Maurier

373. “Dust unto dust. There was no reason then for life – it was only a fraction of a moment between birth and death, a movement upon the surface of water, and then it was still. Janet had loved and suffered, she had known beauty and pain, and now she was finished – blotted by the heedless earth, to be no more than a few dull letters on a stone. Joseph.”

— Daphne du Maurier

374. “Was it true the lovely part of love only lasted a moment and the sorrow went on for a lifetime?”

— Daphne du Maurier

375. “You have a very lovely and unusual name.”

— Daphne du Maurier

376. “I had only one plan, which was to finish the book, and Jennifer was turning out to be a hard-headed young woman, quite different from how I had intended her. This must surely mean I had no control over my characters.”

— Daphne du Maurier

377. “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

378. “In the afternoon I begin writing a book, it is called The Alternative. It is fun writing it.’ The Alternative, like John, in the Wood of the World, leaves a total blank in memory. Possibly, like many a work of genius, it never got beyond the first page!”

— Daphne du Maurier

379. “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

380. “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

— Daphne du Maurier

381. “What is the truth?” I asked, in renewed agony of doubt – for had I, after all, done wrong in leaving my husband to his possible fate at le Chesne-Bidault? Were hordes of brigands even now setting fire to my home and everything I held dear? “The truth?” repeated Robert. “Nobody ever knows the truth in this world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

382. “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

383. “No, Robert did not understand. Handsome, gay, debonair, perfectly self-possessed, he had yet not grasped the fact that his young sister, with her smattering of education and her provincial dress, belonged to a world that he had long left behind him, a world which, despite its apparent backwardness and rustic simplicity, had greater depth than his.”

— Daphne du Maurier

384. “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

385. “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

386. “The door from the kitchen opened, and the smell of Freada’s Chesterfield cigarettes.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

388. “He’s made his own hell and there’s no one but himself to thank for it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

389. “Years of study, years of training, the fluency with which I spoke their language, taught their history, described their culture, had never brought me closer to the people themselves.”

— Daphne du Maurier

390. “This moment now, at twenty past eleven, this must never be lost,” and I shut my eyes to make the experience more lasting.”

— Daphne du Maurier

391. “Does forty-two seem very old to you?” he said.”

— Daphne du Maurier

392. “Daphne du Maurier was the fifth-generation descendant of a French master craftsman who settled in England during the Revolution. The Glass-Blowers, the fictionalized story of his family, was originally published in 1963, but du Maurier first conceived of writing about her French forebears in the mid-1950s. She had recently completed her novel about Mary Anne Clarke, her famous great-great-grandmother, and a complementary work about the French side of her family seemed logical.”

— Daphne du Maurier

393. “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

394. “There was some misunderstanding,” she replied. “Your uncle bought it through a friend. Mr. Bassat did not know who Uncle Joss was until we were settled in, and then he was not very pleased.”

— Daphne du Maurier

395. “I know I must seem unsympathetic and cold, but this is the nineteenth century, you know, and men don’t murder one another without reason. I believe I have as much right to drive you on the King’s highway as your uncle himself. Having gone so far, don’t you think you had better let me hear the rest of your story? What is your name, and how long have you been living at Jamaica Inn?”

— Daphne du Maurier

396. “I heard a rustle where the trees grew thickest, and suddenly to my nostrils came that rank vixen smell about me in the air, tainting the very leaves under my feet; yet I saw nothing, and all the daffodils, leaning from the banks on either side of me, stayed poised and still, without a breath to stir them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

397. “George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier – how noble it sounded! The child would at least have a good start in life, with such remarkable names.”

— Daphne du Maurier

398. “I was young, and I’d never been hurt before.”

— Daphne du Maurier

399. “He wanted to lose the memory of that world; they wished to hold it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

400. “A wave of perfume came from these fine folk, a strange exotic scent like flowers no longer fresh, whose petals curl, and this stale richness somehow mingled with the drab dirt of those beside us, pressing forward even as we did, in a dumb desire to see the Queen.”

— Daphne du Maurier