How lovely it was to be alone again. No, I did not mean that. It was disloyal, wicked. It was not what I meant. Maxim was my life and my world.
There was nothing for it but to sit in my usual place beside Mrs. Van Hopper while she, like a large, complacent spider, spun her wide net of tedium about the stranger’s person.” I think I’ve met Mrs. Van Hopper on numerous occasions.
Does forty-two seem very old to you?” he said.
What they had dreamed of, schemed for, accomplished, no longer mattered, it was all forgotten.
Whether he talked or not made little difference to my mood. My only enemy was the clock on the dash-board, whose hands would move relentlessly to one o’clock.
This was a woman’s room, graceful, fragile, the room of someone who had chosen every particle of furniture with great care, so that each chair, each vase, each small, infinitesimal thing should be in harmony with one another, and with her own personality.
He spent much of his time pottering in the drawing-room and looking through old letters of Guy’s, old sketches of Papa’s. It was as though he wanted to soak himself in the past and shut away the present and the future.
Was it true the lovely part of love only lasted a moment and the sorrow went on for a lifetime?
There was no other sound except the husky wheezing of the clock in the hall and the sudden whirring note preparatory to the strike. It rang the hour – three o’clock – and then ticked on, choking and gasping like a dying man who cannot catch his breath.
We can never go back again, that much is certain.
They say death does this to us once we are warned. Unconsciously, we strive not to waste time. Pettiness falls away, with all those things of little value in our lives. Could we but have known sooner, we tell ourselves, it would have been otherwise; no anger, no destruction, above everything no pride.
What a time you’ve been. You can’t afford to dream this morning, you know, there’s too much to be done.
The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky.
When I go, Danny, I want to go quickly, like the snuffing out of a candle.
I’m afraid it does not concern me very much what Mrs. de Winter used to do,” I said. “I am Mrs. de Winter now, you know.
Everything she wrote on these delicate matters was tactful – the truth was between the lines – but many of her father’s contemporaries were outraged on his behalf and regarded what had been written as a betrayal.
Mary’s mother turned to her and said, “There’s something of me gone in the grave with poor Nell, Mary. I don’t know whether it’s my faith or what it is, but my heart feels tired and I can’t go on anymore.
I will tell you how I sought refuge from myself in Christianity and found it to be built upon hatred and jealousy, and greed – all the man-made attributes of civilization, while the old pagan barbarism was naked and clean.
Daphne du Maurier was the fifth-generation descendant of a French master craftsman who settled in England during the Revolution. The Glass-Blowers, the fictionalized story of his family, was originally published in 1963, but du Maurier first conceived of writing about her French forebears in the mid-1950s. She had recently completed her novel about Mary Anne Clarke, her famous great-great-grandmother, and a complementary work about the French side of her family seemed logical.
I’d be no use in a town,” said Mary. “I’ve never known anything but this life by the river, and I don’t want to. Going into Helston is town enough for me. I’m best here, with the few chickens that’s left to us, and the green stuff in the garden, and the old pig, and a bit of a boat on the river. What would I do up to Bodmin with my Aunt Patience?