Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Mannerly with me."" Do you mean you want a secretary or something?"" No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.

— Daphne du Maurier

Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.

— Daphne du Maurier

For love, as she knew it now, was something without shame and without reserve, the possession of two people who had no barrier between them, and no pride; whatever happened to him would happen to her too, all feeling, all movement, all sensation of body and of mind.

— Daphne du Maurier

Happiness is not a possession to be prized it is a quality of thought a state of mind.

— Daphne du Maurier

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

— Daphne du Maurier

He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a gray cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. --from a Difference in Temperament

— Daphne du Maurier

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.

— Daphne du Maurier

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.

— Daphne du Maurier

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...

— Daphne du Maurier

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. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardice, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then--how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself.

— Daphne du Maurier