Daphne du Maurier
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.Collection: Happiness
Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.Collection: Women
When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.
All autobiography is self-indulgent.
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?
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.Collection: Sunshine
But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.Collection: Book
Look on each day that comes as a challenge, as a test of courage. The pain will come in waves, some days worse than others, for no apparent reason. Accept the pain. Little by little, you will find new strength, new vision, born of the very pain and loneliness which seem, at first, impossible to master.Collection: Pain
A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.Collection: Dreamer
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.Collection: Memories
How simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Joy
There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.Collection: Second Chance
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.Collection: Adversity
Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.Collection: Farewell
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.Collection: Air
People who travel are always fugitives.Collection: People
A bad workman blames his tools.Collection: Tools
I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.Collection: Travel
no person will ever get into my blood as a place can ... People and things pass away, but not places.Collection: Blood
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.Collection: Beach
Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fearCollection: Boredom
I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.Collection: Black
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 distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.Collection: Life
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.Collection: First Love
Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.Collection: Essence
Life and death do not wait for legal action.Collection: Life And Death
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.Collection: Running
If you think I'm one of the people who try to be funny at breakfast you're wrong. I'm invariably illtempered in the early morning.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Children
I could fight with the living but I could not fight the dead. If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved, someone he wrote to, visited, dined with, slept with, I could fight her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her anymore. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was to strong for me.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Sadness
Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding.Collection: Light
Watch that boy. He's going to startle somebody someday.Collection: Boys
...the routine of life goes on, whatever happens, we do the same things, go through the little performance of eating, sleeping, washing. No crisis can break through the crust of habit.Collection: Sleep
…you guessed that somewhere, in heaven knew what country and what guise, there was someone who was part of your body and your brain, and that without him you were lost, a straw blown by the wind.Collection: Country
I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.Collection: Children
Why did dogs make one want to cry? There was something so quiet and hopeless about their sympathy. Jasper, knowing something was wrong, as dogs always do. Trunks being packed. Cars being brought to the door. Dogs standing with drooping tails, dejected eyes. Wandering back to their baskets in the hall when the sound of the car dies away.Collection: Dog
I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.Collection: Children
The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed.Collection: Wall
So you see, when war comes to one’s village, one’s doorstep, it isn’t tragic and impersonal any longer. It is just an excuse to vomit private hatred. That is why I am not a great patriot.Collection: War
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.Collection: Time
I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.' 'You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.' 'For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five.Collection: Ninety Nine
No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Paris
I would have gone too but I wanted to come straight back to you.I kept thinking of you, waiting here, all by yourself, not knowing what was going to happen.Collection: Thinking Of You
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.Collection: Sleep