S. > S.'s Quotes

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“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, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. 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. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“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.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”
― Daphne duMaurier

“Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Jamaica Inn

“I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire.”
― Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca

“It wouldn't make for sanity would it, living with the devil.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows. Now warm, now chill, next joyous, then despairing, the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him, no matter how stable, even loving. No ties, no binding chains, save those he forges for himself. Or so he thinks. But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it. Therefore create. Act God. Fashion men and women as Prometheus fashioned them from clay, and, by doing this, work out the unconscious strife within and be reconciled. While in others, imbued with a desire to mold, to instruct, to spread a message that will inspire the reader and so change his world, though the motive may be humane and even noble--many great works have done just this--the source is the same dissatisfaction, a yearning to escape.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“Why this man should love that woman, what queer chemical mix-up in our blood draws us to one another, who can tell?”
― Daphne du Maurier

“There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“We're not meant for happiness, you and I.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Come and see us if you feel like it,' she said. 'I always expect people to ask themselves. Life is too short to send out invitations.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“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 about Rebecca. Beatrice and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. 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 folly built up a great wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness Maxim would have told these things four months, five months ago.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“...but I should say that kindliness, and sincerity, and if I may say so--modesty--are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.”
― Daphne duMaurier

“She knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman's Creek

“Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear”
― Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca

“I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“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, The "Rebecca" Notebook: And Other Memories

“She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Dead men tell no tales, Mary.”
― Daphne duMaurier, Jamaica Inn

“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, Jamaica Inn

“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 of them, and they followed strange laws of which we could know nothing, they obeyed the tangled orders of their own sub-conscious minds. Perhaps he was one of them, and here we were within six feet of death.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“What I’ve loved most after you, is myself: that is, my dignity and that strength which made me superior to other men. That Strength was my life. You’ve broken it with a word, so I must die.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo