Daphne Du Maurier Quotes

Watch that boy. He's going to startle somebody someday.

All whispers and echoes from a past that is gone teem into the sleeper's brain, and he is with them, and part of them.

Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with me." "Do you mean you want a secretary or something?" "No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.

And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.

I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.

there's something about Paris that gives you a mental slap all the time, and you can't just sit still and do nothing. You've got to work, to keep up with the pace, the sting in the atmosphere.

…you guessed that somewhere, in heaven knew what country and what guise, there was someone who was part of your body and your brain, and that without him you were lost, a straw blown by the wind.

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.

If there’s one thing that makes a man sick, it’s to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.' 'You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.' 'For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five.

You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.

I could not ask forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.

No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.

From the very first, I knew that it would be so...I smiled to myself, and said, "That -- and none other.

So you see, when war comes to one’s village, one’s doorstep, it isn’t tragic and impersonal any longer. It is just an excuse to vomit private hatred. That is why I am not a great patriot.

Life and death do not wait for legal action.

When she smiled it was as though she embraced the world.

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with me.""Do you mean you want a secretary or something?""No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.

We've got a bond in common, you and I. We are both alone in the world.

Happiness is not a possession to be prized it is a quality of thought a state of mind.

There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair

how lacking in intuition men could be in persuading themselves that mending some stranger's socks, and attending to his comfort, could content a woman...

But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.

- because just by hating it’s possible to be purified from love, just with the sword, with the fire..

I know that age, it's a particularly obstinate one, and a thousand bogies won't make you fear the future. A pity we can't change over.

Maxim's voice, clear and strong, "Will someone take my wife outside?She is going to faint.

She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment.

Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.

The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

She could not separate success from peace of mind. The two must go together.