Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (/duː ˈmɒrieɪ/; 13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) was an English author and playwright.
here was a silence between them for a moment, and she wondered if all women, when in love, were torn between two impulses, a longing to throw modesty and reserve to the winds and confess everything, and an equal determination to conceal the love forever, to be cool, aloof, utterly detached, to die rather than admit a thing so personal, so intimate.
He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world. . . all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate--call it what you will--happened to be me.
We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.
What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you?
When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter of a woman’s hurrying footsteps, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled shoe.
Watch that boy. He's going to startle somebody someday.
When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?
Why, he wondered, should he remember her suddenly, on such a day, watching the rain falling on the apple trees?
Happiness happens when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
I have no talent for making new friends, but oh such genius for fidelity to old ones.
A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.
There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.
Dead men tell no tales, Mary.
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.
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.
People who travel are always fugitives.
No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.
. . . and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace.
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.