Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “What a funny thing to do,” said the grandmother. “I don’t think much of books for a wedding-present. Nobody ever gave me any books when I was married. I should never have read them if they had.”

— Daphne du Maurier

352. “Robert rather lost his head, and kept forgetting things, napkins at lunch, and handing vegetables. He wore a harassed expression, like someone who has got to catch a train.”

— Daphne du Maurier

353. “Naturally, at the outbreak of the Revolution he followed the example of the clergy and the aristocracy and emigrated to England with his young bride, my mother, and suffered much penury in consequence. His full name was Robert-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, and he died tragically and suddenly in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, on returning to France in the hopes of restoring the family fortunes.”

— Daphne du Maurier

354. “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

355. “The restlessness has gone, the indecision and also the great heights of exultation, the strange depths of desolation. I am secure now, and certain of myself. There is peace and contentment.”

— Daphne du Maurier

356. “The happy thing about success was that it meant he could provide for his children and his grandchildren, and they would none of them know want and dire poverty as he had done. He would take care that there would be enough for all of them when he died – enough for distant cousins and little grand-nephews and the straggling remnants of the Busson clan.”

— Daphne du Maurier

357. “But the point is this, monsieur,” explained the patron, “the reason why madame complains of you, is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious.”

— Daphne du Maurier

358. “She walked briskly, with the quick step of one who did not suffer, or perhaps refused to suffer, any of the inconveniences of old age;.”

— Daphne du Maurier

359. “But the people enjoy watching the dog,” he said swiftly, trying to divert Charles. “That’s why they go to the circus, for distraction. Maria supplies the same drug in the theater, and I give it in large doses to all the errand-boys who whistle my songs. I think you’ve got hold of the wrong word. We’re pedlars, hawking our wares – not parasites.”

— Daphne du Maurier

360. “I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

361. “Trust you? Good God, of course I trust you. It’s you who won’t trust me, you damned little fool.‘” He laughed silently, and bent down to her, putting his arms round her, and he kissed her then as he had kissed her in Launceston, but deliberately now, with anger and exasperation. “Play your own game by yourself, then, and leave me to play mine,” he told her. ‘If you must be a boy, I can’t stop you, but for the sake of your face, which I have kissed, and shall kiss again, keep away from danger.”

— Daphne du Maurier

362. “So much for women’s value in other days. Goods reared for purchase, then bought and sold in the market-place, or rather manor. Small wonder that, their duty done, they looked round for consolation, either by taking a lover or by playing an active part in the bargaining over their own daughters and sons.”

— Daphne du Maurier

363. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

365. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

389. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

400. “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