Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Yes, of course it was kind, but why must I be reminded of the fact, and would I ever write enough short stories to sell, and so make some money that would be mine, all mine, so that I could pay the cook and buy my own food, and keep myself and be truly independent? It just had to happen. I refused to be beaten.”

— Daphne du Maurier

402. “We can see the film stars of yesterday in yesterday’s films, hear the voices of poest and singers on a record, keep the plays of dead dramatists upon our bookshelves, but the actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls.”

— Daphne du Maurier

403. “You’re all wounded and hurt and torn inside.”

— Daphne du Maurier

404. “People always gossiped about us, even as children. We created a strange sort of hostility wherever we went. In those days, during and after the First World War, when other children were well-mannered and conventional, we were ill-disciplined and wild. Those dreadful Delaneys.”

— Daphne du Maurier

405. “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

406. “It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.”

— Daphne du Maurier

407. “You ought to take more exercise, if you’re inclined to have a liver. Play golf.”

— Daphne du Maurier

408. “Mary shook her head. ‘I’ve only seen the evil,’ she said; ‘I’ve only seen the suffering there’s been, and the cruelty, and the pain. When my uncle came to Jamaica Inn he must have cast his shadow over the good things, and they died.”

— Daphne du Maurier

409. “Friendship and duty are two separate things,” he said, “and I put duty first. You are another generation, you wouldn’t understand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

410. “I wished he were less remote; and I anything but the creature that I was in my shabby coat and skirt, my broad-brimmed schoolgirl hat.”

— Daphne du Maurier

411. “What I had thought was love for me, for myself as a person, was not love. It was just that he was a man, and I was his wife and was young, and he was lonely.”

— Daphne du Maurier

412. “When I go, Danny, I want to go quickly, like the snuffing out of a candle.”

— Daphne du Maurier

413. “Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die; the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

414. “He had no answer to that, or to any of her thoughts, and the smile that hovered a moment at the corner of her mouth and went as swiftly – it happened now, in her pretence of sleep – had no connection with him, or with his feelings, or with their life together. It was remote, the smile of someone he had never known.”

— Daphne du Maurier

415. “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

416. “The world I knew has gone. This is tomorrow.”

— Daphne du Maurier

417. “They’ve been drinking too,” said Pappy, examining the tooth-glass. “Cognac, judging by the smell. I never knew my daughter drank.” “She doesn’t,” said Celia, smoothing Pappy’s bed. “She always has orangeade. Unless it’s a first night, when she has champagne.” “Then it must be Niall,” said Pappy. “Someone – and who can it be but Niall? – has been pouring cognac into my tooth-glass. I shall attack Freada. Freada is responsible.” He filled the tooth-glass with cognac for himself.”

— Daphne du Maurier

418. “This astonished us as children, for we grew up beside the charcoal burners, called them by their Christian names, watched them at work, visited them in their log huts when they were ill; but to my mother, the bailiff’s daughter from St. Christophe, gently nurtured, educated and well spoken, the rude shouts of these wild men of the woods at midnight must have sounded like devils in hell.”

— Daphne du Maurier

419. “Mournful, mournful. I wanted to be alone, but the others would laugh and talk. Always the past, just out of reach, waiting to be recaptured. Why did I feel so sad thinking of a past I had never known?”

— Daphne du Maurier

420. “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

421. “A mock trial was set in motion, and the mayor Montlibert forced to interrogate the prisoners. It was obvious, even to someone like myself who knew nothing of the law, that none of the men had done wrong. No arms had been found in the house. The men had no pretensions to being aristocrats. Monsieur Villette, who had presided over the proceedings in the church, spoke up in their defense.”

— Daphne du Maurier

422. “He took her face in his hands and kissed it, and she saw that he was laughing. “When you’re an old maid in mittens down at Helford, you’ll remember that,” he said, “and it will have to last you to the end of your days. ‘He stole horses,’ you’ll say to yourself, ’and he didn’t care for women; and but for my pride I’d have been with him now.”

— Daphne du Maurier

423. “The feel of her own pillow, and of her own blankets reassured her. Both were familiar. And being tired was familiar too, it was a solid bodily ache, like the tiredness after too much jumping or cricket.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

425. “He would stare down at us in our new world from a long-distant past – a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

426. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

428. “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

429. “There was no other sound except the husky wheezing of the clock in the hall and the sudden whirring note preparatory to the strike. It rang the hour – three o’clock – and then ticked on, choking and gasping like a dying man who cannot catch his breath.”

— Daphne du Maurier

430. “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

431. “My brother Jem, damn him, he was the baby. Hanging onto mother’s skirts when Matt and I were grown men. I never did see eye to eye with Jem. Too smart he is, too sharp with his tongue. Oh, they’ll catch him in time and hang him, same as they did my father.”

— Daphne du Maurier

432. “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

433. “And she passed through the stage door and was inside the theater. Her heart was still beating fast, and her hands were burning, but she felt steadier suddenly, the feeling of panic had gone from her. It was because she was inside the theater.”

— Daphne du Maurier

434. “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

435. “Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.”

— Daphne du Maurier

436. “Then I was glad of the presence of Jake near to me at all times, for a horror would come upon me because of the vast solitude of space and the solitary splendor of the regions where we were drifting; even the white stars seemed cold and terribly remote, and we, poor human beings on our little ship, were wretched and pathetic in our attempts to equal their wisdom, nor had we any right to venture upon the imperturbability of these waters.”

— Daphne du Maurier

437. “Perhaps we shall not see each other again. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best as I can, the story of your family. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that same breath, shatter and destroy it. If what I write displeases you, it will not matter. Throw my letters in the fire unread, and keep your illusions. For myself, I have always preferred to know the truth.”

— Daphne du Maurier

438. “Soon we won’t be children anymore. We shall be like Them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

439. “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

440. “The only time I got into trouble was when I forged M’s signature on the weekly report we had to take home every Friday and take back to school again signed by one of our parents. The reason I did so was that M happened to be out at the time and I thought I could save myself trouble.”

— Daphne du Maurier

441. “She had beauty that endured, and a smile that was not forgotten. Somewhere her voice still lingered, and the memory of her words.”

— Daphne du Maurier

442. “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

443. “It was unlike anything I had ever known. I had no feeling, no pain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

445. “But once a woman stole the initiative, plundered the perquisites and took the lead, what happened to the globe? The fabric cracked.”

— Daphne du Maurier

446. “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

447. “I don’t think there is any necessity to bring Inspector Welch into the affair – yet,” said Colonel Julyan. His voice was different, harsher. I did not like the way he used the word, “yet.” Why must he use it at all? I did not like it.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

449. “I’d be no use in a town,” said Mary. “I’ve never known anything but this life by the river, and I don’t want to. Going into Helston is town enough for me. I’m best here, with the few chickens that’s left to us, and the green stuff in the garden, and the old pig, and a bit of a boat on the river. What would I do up to Bodmin with my Aunt Patience?”

— Daphne du Maurier

450. “The house was large, redbricked, and gabled. Late Victorian I supposed. Not an attractive house. I could tell in a glance it was the sort of house that was aggressively well-kept by a big staff. And all for one old lady who was nearly blind.”

— Daphne du Maurier