Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “She thought of the laughing, carefree Jem who had driven her to Launceston, who had swung hands with her in the market square, who had kissed her and held her. Now he was grave and silent, his face in shadow. The idea of a dual personality troubled her, and frightened her as well. He was like a stranger to her tonight, obsessed by some grim purpose she could not understand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

402. “He was like a schoolmaster after all. It was just as she had feared. He was now going to make a fuss about her drawings, and write to Pappy, and worry Pappy, and say that time must be set aside for her to work, and everything would become a performance, and a ritual, and be difficult. Drawing would become a burden instead of an escape.”

— Daphne du Maurier

403. “When the water drains from the marshes, and little by little the yellow sands appear, rippling and hard and firm, it seems to my foolish fancy, as I lie here, that I too go seaward with the tide, and all my old hidden dreams that I thought buried for all time are bare and naked to the day, just as the shells and the stones are on the sands.”

— Daphne du Maurier

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

408. “Freada said nothing was worth doing without effort. Pappy used to say that too. Everyone said it. But when things happened easily, what was the sense in driving yourself, in sweating blood?”

— Daphne du Maurier

409. “Here was Pierre laying down the law about what the King should say to the Assembly, or what the Assembly should say to the King, and yet he could not order his own unruly boys to come down from off the hay-shocks. My mother would have done so and boxed the ears of the pair of them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

410. “We never knew the ordinary placid routine of child life, the settled home, the humdrum day by day. For if yesterday we were in London, tomorrow would be Paris, and the after-tomorrow, Rome.”

— Daphne du Maurier

411. “If Michael Joseph of Curtis Brown tells me he doesn’t like it, or I must rewrite, he can go to hell. I can’t go back to it any more.”

— Daphne du Maurier

412. “I’m convinced that a chap’s best chance of doing his finest work is by sticking very much to himself, and of course working very hard, and, most important of all, by talking very little about it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

413. “In two minutes she would have forgotten all about having asked Celia for the day, and would be planning something else. If only Maria lived a little closer, Celia could have shared the responsibility of Caroline. It would only mean two children to look after instead of one. Because Pappy was a child. He needed humoring, and coaxing, and taking care of in much the same way as a child.”

— Daphne du Maurier

414. “Mander smiled: “A woman is as old as she looks, a man is as old as he feels, Sir Julius. You know the old saying?”

— Daphne du Maurier

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

419. “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

420. “We change from the awakening questing creatures we were once, afire with wonder, and expectancy, and doubt, to persons of opinion and authority, our habits formed, our characters moulded in a pattern.”

— Daphne du Maurier

421. “The good monks are waiting upon eternity, they can wait a few more hours for you.”

— Daphne du Maurier

422. “Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.”

— Daphne du Maurier

423. “What they had dreamed of, schemed for, accomplished, no longer mattered, it was all forgotten.”

— Daphne du Maurier

424. “The trouble is that goodness dies, and lies buried in the earth. Cleverness passes on and becomes degenerate.”

— Daphne du Maurier

425. “Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession anymore. It was something to be traded, bought, and sold. It fetched a high price, or a low one. It was kicked in the common market. Always, forever after, the possessor of the talent must keep a wary eye upon the purchaser. Therefore, if you were sensitive, if you were proud, you turned your back upon the market. You made excuses.”

— Daphne du Maurier

426. “I think you had better leave the room, William, before I throw something at you.” “Very good, my lady.”

— Daphne du Maurier

427. “How pleasant,′ Dona said, peeling her fruit; ’the rest of us can only run away from time to time, and however much we pretend to be free, we know it is only for a little while – our hands and our feet are tied.”

— Daphne du Maurier

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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