Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

356. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

362. “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

363. “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

364. “The thing had been a tragedy, but tragedies become less poignant as the months pass.”

— Daphne du Maurier

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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. “The world of today asleep, and my world not awakened, or not as yet, until the drug possessed me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

377. “It wasn’t like that for us,” said Niall, “all bright, and clean, and purged and commonplace. Plastic toys. Things that go in and out.” “Perhaps it was,” said Maria; “perhaps we don’t remember.” “I do remember,” said Niall. “I remember everything. That’s the trouble. I remember much too much.”

— Daphne du Maurier

378. “Bitterness goes with people when they die.”

— Daphne du Maurier

379. “I like the look of you and the feel of you, and that’s enough for any man. It ought to be enough for a woman too.”

— Daphne du Maurier

380. “Most people would send their letters and telegrams to the Haymarket. The flowers too. When you came to think of it the whole business was horribly like having an operation. The telegrams, the flowers. And the long hours of waiting.”

— Daphne du Maurier

381. “In fact, one of the first decrees passed, the day after the storming of the Tuileries, was an order giving every municipality throughout the country the right to arrest suspects on sight.”

— Daphne du Maurier

382. “Nonsense,’ snapped Ellen. ‘It would cause a panic at once. If you feel ill, go to your room and lie down. The master is going to make up this medicine.’ ‘If it’s like the stuff he gave me for kidney trouble, I’d rather have the cholera, madam,’ said the frightened woman.”

— Daphne du Maurier

383. “I tried Magnus two or three times later, but there was never a reply, and I spent a restless evening unable to settle to newspapers, books, records, or TV. Finally, fed up with myself and the whole problem, to which there seemed no solution, I went early to bed, and slept, to my astonishment when I awoke next morning, amazingly well.”

— Daphne du Maurier

384. “It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.”

— Daphne du Maurier

385. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “I’m fond of you, Mary; you’ve got sense, and you’ve got pluck; you’d make a good companion to a man. They ought to have made you a boy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

386. “It seemed strange that things could still be done to me after I was dead, that my body would perhaps be found and handled by people I should never know, that really a little life would go on about me which I should never feel.”

— Daphne du Maurier

387. “Oh, mamma dearest, don’t let’s look for the clouds till they are on us,’ he said in despair. ‘Things must come all right for us in the end. As long as my eye does not fail me we need none of us starve.”

— Daphne du Maurier

388. “So much laughter, so much gaiety, up in the wards there with the wounded men, and the same below, in the pillared hall, and out in the grounds too, where the more mobile would come rabbiting. Once only did I realise how the war must have touched them, and this was when a fresh entry of wounded came by ambulance to the entrance in the great hall.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

391. “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

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. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

395. “In those days, before the First World War, young women did not use makeup. Anna was free of lipstick, and her gold hair was rolled in great coils over her ears.”

— Daphne du Maurier

396. “It does happen, you know, from time to time, that a man finds a woman who is the answer to all his more searching dreams. And the two have understanding of each other, from the lightest moment to the darkest mood.”

— Daphne du Maurier

397. “He was folding up his napkin, pushing back his plate, and I wondered how it was he spoke so casually, as thought the matter was of little consequence, a mere adjustment of plans. Whereas to me it was a bombshell, exploding in a thousand tiny fragments.”

— Daphne du Maurier

398. “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

399. “Memories are very beautiful things, when you are old.”

— Daphne du Maurier

400. “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