Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier
Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning DBEwas an English author and playwright...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 May 1907
sadness sleep fate
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.
sleep break-through routine
...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.
sleep order law
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.
writing long hills
Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.
morning thinking people
If you think I'm one of those people who try to be funny at breakfast you're wrong. I'm invariably ill-tempered in the early morning.
writing scary firsts
When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
book hero mean
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?
people
People who travel are always fugitives.
life-and-death waiting action
Life and death do not wait for legal action.
book self autobiography
All autobiography is self-indulgent.
memories eye animal
[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.
book names name-dropping
And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.
stars rocks air
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.
simple mirrors simple-life
How simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten.