Daphne du Maurier Quotes

Man's greatest fear is chaos.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (last lines)

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

I didn't dare think of the future; the past was still happening.

Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

At odd and unpredictable times, we cling in fright to the past .

Most of my life, I feel I have been Unicycling at the Edge of the Abyss! If fact, this will be the name of my book if I ever write one, or a one man stand up routine. I have used it as the name of a collection of my musical compositions written during the '90s. It fits the scary journey I feel I've been on.

The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.

Now is the age of anxiety.

Not a fan of spiders. I saw the movie 'Arachnophobia,' which was single-handedly rated in the top three worst choices of my life.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's you can never go back.

I had to test a new terror in myself.

Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

I had my moments when I got very frightened that I would not recover.

I tend not to look back. It's confusing.

I spent my entire life being afraid. I was afraid of everything - height, flights - I had no idea why.

I have crazy claustrophobic dreams, weird elevator dreams where the elevator closes in and all of a sudden I am lying down - oh my God, it's a casket. Just freaky stuff like that.

The anxiety does crawl up. The other night I was having panic attacks: 'Oh, my God, what's going to happen to me? Am I ever going to have another job?'

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

When you whisper about something, it's too big, and you can't get it under control and take control of it.

I'm not sure I always feel like I'm in the seat. Sometimes I'm only holding on by one hand and flying out behind the roller coaster. I don't know anybody who doesn't feel that way.

Fear has many faces.