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22d4702
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As I stood there,hushed and still,I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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8649121
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A pleasantly situated hotel close to the sea, and chalets by the water's edge where one breakfasted. Clientele well-to-do, and although I count myself no snob I cannot abide paper bags and orange peel. ("Not After Midnight")"
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snobbery
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Daphne du Maurier |
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e79fe2e
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A man's jealousy is like a child's, fitful and foolish, without depth. A woman's jealousy is adult, which is very different.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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01e6a5a
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Maxim's voice, clear and strong, "Will someone take my wife outside?She is going to faint."
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Daphne du Maurier |
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bacc8db
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He was young and ardent in a hundred happy ways.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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662be8b
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The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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a429a86
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He looked down at me without recognition, and I realized with a little stab of anxiety that he must have forgotten all about me, perhaps for some considerable time, and that he himself was so lost in the labyrinth of his own unquiet thoughts that I did not exist.
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thoughts
realization
worry
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Daphne du Maurier |
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3b89ad2
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They say that when we sleep our sub-conscious selves are revealed, our hidden thoughts and desires are written plain upon our features and our bodies like the tracings of rivers on a map; and no one reads them but the darkness.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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e33b941
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And he went on eating his marmalade as though everything were natural.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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86bd1d3
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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 distorted 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 ..
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truth
shyness
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Daphne du Maurier |
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3e19159
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Then all at once she turned to me, her face pale, her eyes strangely alight. She said, "Is it possible to love someone so much, that it gives one a pleasure to hurt them? To hurt them by jealousy, I mean, and to hurt myself at the same time. Pleasure and pain, an equal mingling of pleasure and pain, just as an experiment, a rare sensation?"
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Daphne du Maurier |
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ced1483
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No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be.
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romance
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Daphne du Maurier |
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ebcdc81
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I will shed no more tears, like a spoilt child. For whatever happens we have had what we have had. No one can take that from us. And I have been alive, who was never alive before.
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love
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Daphne du Maurier |
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41f1c16
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It was a day to be inside somewhere, cosseted and loved; by a warm fireside with the clatter of friendly cups and saucers, a sleepy cat licking his paws, a cyclamen in a pot on a windowsill putting forth new buds.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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908738f
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I am no traveller, you are my world.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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33b1179
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Rebecca, always Rebecca. Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca. I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the capable clever hands. Hands that could steer a boat, could hold a horse. Hands that arranged flowers, made the models of ships, and wrote "Max from Rebecca" on the flyleaf of a book. I knew her face too, small ..
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Daphne du Maurier |
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a7d4273
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It's natural, I suppose," said Colonel Julyan, "for all of us to wish to look different. We are all children in some ways."
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Daphne du Maurier |
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01e48be
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I don't want to love like a woman or feel like a woman, Mr Davey; there's pain that way, and suffering, and misery that can last a lifetime. I didn't bargain for this; I don't want it.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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2a76499
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How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?
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Daphne du Maurier |
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962caaa
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Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson face..
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Daphne du Maurier |
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1c06b04
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This is what it means to be a fanatic - but a fanatic, that is to say, in a very special sense. It has little in common with the obsession of the politician or the artist, for instance, for both of these understand in a greater or lesser degree the impulse which drives them. But the sportsman fanatic - that is another matter entirely. His thoughts fixed solely on a vision of that mounted trophy against the wall, the eyes now dead that were ..
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sportsman
trophy
hunting
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Daphne du Maurier |
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7f041c9
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Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited. No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gape..
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Daphne du Maurier |
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d4f238b
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It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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3cde5c7
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People always gossiped about us, even as children. We created a strange sort of hostility wherever we went. In those days, during and after the First World War, when other children were well-mannered and conventional, we were ill-disciplined and wild. Those dreadful Delaneys
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Daphne du Maurier |
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0168608
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The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.
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coastline
sun
sea
ocean
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Daphne du Maurier |
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bc33bf2
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Men and women who have never lived make finer captives on the printed page, or if they have lived, and are historical, then the very knowledge that they belong to a past we have not known ourselves induces fancy.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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564f959
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I wondered straightaway how he could sit at peace there, of an evening, with the row of heads staring down at him. There were no pictures, no flowers: only the heads of chamois. The concession to melody was the radiogram and the stack of records of classical music. Foolishly, I had asked, "Why only chamois?" He answered at once, "They fear Man." This might have led to an argument about animals in general, domestic, wild, and those whi..
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relationships
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Daphne du Maurier |
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043d83c
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She's dearer than life itself, that's all I know.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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75473df
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There's a home for you here at North Hill, you know that, and my wife joins me in begging you to stay. Plenty to do, you know, plenty to do. There are flowers to be cut for the house, and letters to write, and the children to scold.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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c83181e
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When Stephen talked about stalking chamois his whole expression changed. The features became more aquiline, the nose sharpened, the chin narrowed, and his eyes-steel blue - somehow took on the cold brilliance of a northern sky. I am being very frank about my husband. He attracted me at those times, and he repelled me too. This man, I told myself when I first met him, is a perfectionist. And he has no compassion. Gratified like all women who..
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perfectionist
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Daphne du Maurier |
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2ea39ec
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In memory of Robert Harris, sometime Major-General of His Majesty's forces before Plymouth, who was buried hereunder the 29th day of June 1655. And of Honor Harris his sister, who was likewise here underneath buried, the 17th day of November, in the year of our Lord 1653. Loyall and stout; they Crime this--this thy praise. Thou'rt here with Honour laid--though without Bayes.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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1db4ffb
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there was nothing quite so shaming, so degrading as a marriage that had failed.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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d1abaa2
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There have been men in arid deserts where the sun has so disfigured them that they have become things of horror - parched and blackened, twisted and torn. Their eyes run blood, their tongues are bitten through - and then they come upon water. I know, because I was one of their number.
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passion
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Daphne du Maurier |
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c87a055
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At twenty-three it takes very little to make the spirits soar.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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74779c0
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She realized for the first time that aversion and attraction ran side by side; that the boundary-line was thin between them.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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2fcf67f
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That corner in the drive, too, where the trees encroach upon. . . the gravel, is not a place in which to pause, not after the sun has set. 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, patter, of a woman's hurrying footstep, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled satin ..
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Daphne du Maurier |
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c35b4ee
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An armchair is always an armchair, to the modern child, never a ship, never a desert island. The pattern on the wall are patterns; not characters whose faces change at dusk... The trouble is, the children have no imagination. They are sweet, and have carefree, honest eyes; but they have not any magic in their day. The magic has all gone...
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Daphne du Maurier |
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4bf6689
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A woman of feeling does not easily give way. You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender. We have our wars and battles, Mr. Ashey. But women can fight too.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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8c9f0f3
|
How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day? In forty, in fifty years? Or will some lingering trace of matter in the brain stay pallid and diseased? Some minuscule cell in the bloo..
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Daphne du Maurier |
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5692d6d
|
Oh, God, I though, this is like two people in a play, in a moment the curtain will come down, we shall bow to the audience, and go off to our dressing-rooms.
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theatre
rebecca
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Daphne du Maurier |
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d797ac0
|
My realisation that all I had ever done in life, not only in France but in England also, was to watch people, never to partake in their happiness or pain, brought such a sense of overwhelming depression, deepened by the rain stinging the windows of the car, that when I came to Le Mans, although I had not intended to stop there and lunch, I changed my mind, hoping to change my mood.
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Daphne du Maurier |
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57bbf95
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Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas. What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands... They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. To eastward, and to the west, the gulls were there. They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line. Had the sea been st..
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Daphne du Maurier |
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a65813a
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Oh, I don't know," he said carelessly. "Put you in a fine gown and a pair of high-heeled shoes, and stick a comb in your hair, I daresay you'd pass for a lady even in a big place like Exeter." "I'm meant to be flattered by that, I suppose," said Mary, "but, thanking you very much, I'd rather wear my old clothes and look like myself."
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Daphne du Maurier |
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dc7d627
|
somewhere there is a Dona of tomorrow, a Dona of the future, of ten years away, to whom all of this will be a thing to cherish, a thing to remember. Much will be forgotten then, perhaps, the sound of the tide on the mud flats, the dark sky, the dark water, the shiver of the trees behinds us and the shadows they cast before them, and the smell of the young bracken and the moss. Even the things we said will be forgotten, the touch of hands, t..
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Daphne du Maurier |