Quote

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.

Daphne du Maurier

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Daphne du Maurier
Age: 81 †
Born: 1907
Born: May 13
Died: 1989
Died: April 19
Author
Biographer
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Dame Daphne du Maurier
Everything
Call
Sleeping
Never
Known
Sadness
Like
Chance
Suddenly
World
Found
Hunger
Someone
Fate
Thought
Sleep
Magnified
Persons
Beauty
Woke
Person
Happened
Thirst

More quotes by Daphne du Maurier

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Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
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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.
Daphne du Maurier
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I could not ask forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.
Daphne du Maurier
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I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.
Daphne du Maurier
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here was a silence between them for a moment, and she wondered if all women, when in love, were torn between two impulses, a longing to throw modesty and reserve to the winds and confess everything, and an equal determination to conceal the love forever, to be cool, aloof, utterly detached, to die rather than admit a thing so personal, so intimate.
Daphne du Maurier
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A bad workman blames his tools.
Daphne du Maurier
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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.
Daphne du Maurier
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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.
Daphne du Maurier
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A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.
Daphne du Maurier
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I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.
Daphne du Maurier
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The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
Daphne du Maurier
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[Referring to the birds:] Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.
Daphne du Maurier
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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.
Daphne du Maurier
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You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.
Daphne du Maurier
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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.
Daphne du Maurier
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... and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace.
Daphne du Maurier
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Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.
Daphne du Maurier
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The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.
Daphne du Maurier
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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.
Daphne du Maurier
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I had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.
Daphne du Maurier