Quotes by Daphne du Maurier

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

“No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she...”

“We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, st...”

“Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear”

“The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail f...”

“I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”

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

“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.”

“When Stephen talked about stalking chamois his whole expression changed. The features became more aquiline, the nose sharpened, the chin narrowed, and his eyes-steel blue - somehow took on the cold...”

“I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and foll...”

“They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke ...”

“He had the face of one who walks in his sleep, and for a wild moment the idea came to me that perhaps he was not normal, not altogether sane. There were people who had trances, I had surely heard o...”

“Then Deborah stood at the wicket gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets."Pass through," she said when Deborah reached her. "We saw you coming." The wick...”

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and...”

“Truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very...”

“A woman of feeling does not easily give way. You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. Th...”

“I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hellhound in tow started off once more through the fastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the ...”

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

“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...”