Literary Birthday – 13 May – Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier was born 13 May 1907, and died 19 April 1989.

Daphne du Maurier Quotes

1. Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.
2. 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.
3. All autobiography is self-indulgent.
4. ‘It’s funny,’ I noted in the diary, ‘how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can’t get rid of that.’
5. 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.
6. Ideas for stories began to crowd thick and fast, like people waiting for a train.
7. Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.
8. Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.
9. There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.
10. But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.
11. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.
12. 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.
13. People who travel are always fugitives.
14. 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.
15. When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

Daphne du Maurier was an English author and playwright. Many of her books  have been adapted into films, including the novels, Rebecca, which won a Best Picture Oscar, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories, The Birds and Don’t Look Now.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_Daphne_du_Maurier_restored_bw.jpg

See page for author, Copyrighted free use, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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