Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (/duː ˈmɒrieɪ/; 13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) was an English author and playwright.
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.
The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.
Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.
If there’s one thing that makes a man sick, it’s to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand.
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.
The urge to climb will never be explained. In olden days, perhaps it was a wish to reach the stars. Today, anyone so minded can buy a seat on a plane and feel himself master of the skies. Even so, he will not have rock under his feet, or air upon his face; nor will he know the silence that comes only on the hills.
And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.
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.
Those dripping crumpets, I can see them now. Tiny crisp wedges of toast, and piping-hot, flaky scones. Sandwiches of unknown nature, mysteriously flavoured and quite delectable, and that very special gingerbread. Angel cake, that melted in the mouth, and his rather stodgier companion, bursting with peel and raisins. There was enough food there to keep a starving family for a week.
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.
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.
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
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.
People who travel are always fugitives.
Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty. . . like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
She knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live.
I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.