Daphne du Maurier Quotes

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

But the world moves on, even when you don’t want it to, even when change feels like the end of everything. It never stops. That’s harsh and magical and somewhat comforting because nothing is immutable, however much we want it to be. Moments cannot be caught like fossils in amber, ever- perfect,ever-beautiful. They go dark and raw, full of shadows, leaving you with the memories. And the world moves on.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.

Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

It was hard to remember what the yard had looked like even twelve hours before, undisturbed and pristine. Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

When I was in college, my parents' house burned down, and took a lot of the possessions I'd grown up with. That's probably one thing that made me realize material stuff is not really that important.

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

When we bring back with us the objects most dear, and find those we left unchanged, we are tempted to doubt the lapse of time; but one link in the chain of affection broken, and every thing seems altered.

The New Orleans I knew ain't no more.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Everything in New York seems to merit preserving. If it's not historical, it's personal. If it's not personal, it's cultural. But you can't. You can't save everything. You just have to pack it up in your brain and take it with you when you go.