The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.
Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession any more. It was something to be traded, bought and sold. It fetched a high price, or a low one. It was kicked in the common market.
Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?
Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding.
No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.
When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.
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.
We’re not meant for happiness, you and I.
People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.
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.
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?
All autobiography is self-indulgent.
All whispers and echoes from a past that is gone teem into the sleeper’s brain, and he is with them, and part of them.
She knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
If there’s one thing that makes a man sick, it’s to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand.
Living as we do in an age of noise and bluster, success is now measured accordingly. We must all be seen, and heard, and on the air.
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work.
Dead men tell no tales, Mary.