Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

413. “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

414. “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

415. “She would have him proud of her, she thought, if she took pains to look her best, she would have him showing her off, perhaps, watching her with a smile, she would learn to be smart and clever and she would be his lady.”

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

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

— Daphne du Maurier

422. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

424. “Again, they looked at me for guidance, and the only consolation I could bring to them was to give his last message, that every man must prove himself in his own way. Once is never enough. You must always risk a second time, a third, a fourth, no matter what it is you want to achieve.”

— Daphne du Maurier

425. “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

426. “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

427. “Mary could see that her aunt was eager to speak of things unconnected with her present life; she seemed afraid of any questions, so Mary spared her, and plunged into a description of the last years at Helford, the strain of the bad times, and her mother’s illness and death.”

— Daphne du Maurier

428. “Though Thomas liked to think he had his own way over things, it was generally Janet who had the last say in the matter. She would fling a word at her husband and no more, and he would go off to his work with an uneasy feeling at the back of his mind that she had won. He called it “giving in to Janie,” but it was more than that, it was unconscious subservience to a quieter but stronger personality than his own.”

— Daphne du Maurier

429. “Until the moment of that dismissal with its reason given, he had received out of anywhere – or was it out of nowhere in the morning – that love must suffer for loving; that, the deeper planted, the more it must suffer, in that all true passion of love at its highest force inevitably ends in tragedy: that no story of love between man and woman at its highest could ever come but to a tragic end; that no ending but disillusion can be invented for the illusion which is more than half of such love;.”

— Daphne du Maurier

430. “But Part Four would not be easy. The last member of the four generations, Jane Slade’s great-granddaughter Jennifer, was going to be rather tiresome. I was not sure what to do with her. Could it be that I had lost interest in the whole story?”

— Daphne du Maurier

431. “Now, looking about me in the desolation and the splendour, I knew what I had lacked all these years. I forgot my fellow travellers, forgot the grey fuselage of the crippled ’plane – an anachronism, surely, amid the wilderness of centuries – and forgot too my grey hair, my heavy frame, and all the burden of my five-and-fifty years. I was a boy again, hopeful, eager, seeking an answer to eternity.”

— Daphne du Maurier

432. “The waiters were getting tired, and very bored. The Head Waiter came again and pushed the bill on a plate, neatly folded, under Pappy’s eyes. “What’s this?” said Pappy. “Somebody want my autograph? Who’s got a pencil? Anyone got a pencil so that I can sign my autograph?” The waiter coughed. He avoided Celia’s eyes. “It’s the bill, Pappy,” whispered Celia. “The waiter wants you to pay the bill.”

— Daphne du Maurier

433. “I wondered why I had ever despised these things, why they had once seemed pitiful and absurd. I wondered why the placidity of a home seemed necessary to me now, and why I no longer yearned for the turmoil of a ship upon the sea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

434. “She does not know what is good for her, any more than all the so-called patriots in the country. Someone should have the nerve, and the power, to say ‘Enough.’ But they’re like a lot of sheep without a shepherd.”

— Daphne du Maurier

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Daphne du Maurier

438. “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

439. “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

440. “How can an insurrection be orderly?” I asked. “How can students, told to be armed with any sort of weapon, keep themselves in check?”

— Daphne du Maurier

441. “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

442. “She put back the receiver and lifted it again. She asked for the number of Niall’s room at the theater. She went on ringing. And surely, she thought with sudden hopelessness and a new kind of dead despair, they can’t both be out and away, now at this minute in my life, when I need both of them so much? Surely one of them will come, surely one of them will help me? Because I don’t want to go home alone. I don’t want to be in the house alone, without Pappy.”

— Daphne du Maurier

443. “It seemed to Jennifer that she had sat in the cellar from the beginning of things, that never, since she could remember, had there been anything in her life but this. One day, so she was told, it would be ended. One day there would be no war.”

— Daphne du Maurier

444. “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

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. “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

447. “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

448. “You don’t flatter yourself he’s in love with you, do you? He’s lonely, he can’t bear that great empty house,” was the sanest, most truthful statement she had ever made in her life.”

— Daphne du Maurier

449. “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

450. “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