Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “No doubt it was the truth, or so distorted in her mind that, to her, it became so.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

358. “Who will ever know your heart, who will ever know your mind? You have that fatal quality of silence – of a tight repression that suggests a hidden fire – yes, a burning fire unquenchable.”

— Daphne du Maurier

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “Doctors he would not tolerate; he had always believed in treating himself, and now he had not even the energy to do this.”

— Daphne du Maurier

374. “The word lingered in the air once I had uttered it, dancing before me, and because he received it silently, making no comment, the word magnified itself into something heinous and appalling, a forbidden word, unnatural to the tongue. And I could not call it back, it could never be unsaid.”

— Daphne du Maurier

375. “Mary’s mother turned to her and said, “There’s something of me gone in the grave with poor Nell, Mary. I don’t know whether it’s my faith or what it is, but my heart feels tired and I can’t go on anymore.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

377. “My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society. Then we are given the boot. The passerby averts his gaze, and we are left to crawl out of the ditch alone, or stay there and die.”

— Daphne du Maurier

378. “The months of anxiety had taken their toll of my mother, with the journeys backwards and forwards to Paris which had continued during the summer. She had never cared for the capital; and now, she told us, she had no desire to set foot in it again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

379. “He realised now that there was no hope for his left eye; detachment of the retina was complete; and just before Christmas came again the oculist told him that there was a chance his right eye would also become affected. The shock was terrible.”

— Daphne du Maurier

380. “The fact that I loved him in a sick, hurt, desperate way, like a child or a dog, did not matter.”

— Daphne du Maurier

381. “Then all at once she turned to me, her face pale, her eyes strangely alight. She said, “Is it possible to love someone so much, that it gives one a pleasure to hurt them? To hurt them by jealousy, I mean, and to hurt myself at the same time. Pleasure and pain, an equal mingling of pleasure and pain, just as an experiment, a rare sensation?”

— Daphne du Maurier

382. “What trail of thought, confused and indirect, drove through those minds of theirs, to cloud their judgement? What waves of impulse swept about their being, moving them to anger and withdrawal, or else to sudden generosity? We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

383. “I had not realised until then that grown-up people could be unhappy, that they could cry. I did not want to think about it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

384. “But ‘I read also’ intensified, then and during the following year, with a lot of Scott, a lot of Thackeray, and R. L. Stevenson never far away.”

— Daphne du Maurier

385. “Charles was nowhere to be seen. Maria had to go to look for him. Celia’s anxiety mounted. Pappy would never hang on until after six. He was like a baby with a bottle. He had to keep to his regular time for his whiskey or his whole system became disorganized.”

— Daphne du Maurier

386. “He had been dedicated to science since his first birthday, and Louis-Mathurin would hear of no other career for his eldest son. Kicky was seventeen on the sixth of March, and did not look much like a prospective scientist.”

— Daphne du Maurier

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

393. “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

394. “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

395. “One ought to have some warning, so that one could send a telegram to anyone who might have been wronged, saying, “Forgive me,” and then the wrong would be canceled, blotted out. This was why, in the old days, people flocked round a dying person’s bed, hoping, not to be left something in the will, but for mutual forgiveness, a cessation of ill feeling, a smoothing out of right and wrong. In fact, a sort of love.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

398. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

400. “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