Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (/duː ˈmɒrieɪ/; 13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) was an English author and playwright.
I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.
Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.
I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.
But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we march in unison, no flash of thought or opinion makes a barrier between us.
If there’s one thing that makes a man sick, it’s to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand.
Jem was safe from her, and he would ride away with a song on his lips and a laugh at her expense, forgetful of her, and of his brother, and of God; while she dragged through the years, sullen and bitter, the stain of silence marking her, coming in the end to ridicule as a soured spinster who had been kissed once in her life and could not forget it.
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.
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.
People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.
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 had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.
Dead men tell no tales, Mary.
And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.
There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.
Living as we do in an age of noise and bluster, success is now measured accordingly. We must all be seen, and heard, and on the air.
From the very first, I knew that it would be so. . . I smiled to myself, and said, "That -- and none other.
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.
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.
Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.
We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.