Daphne Du Maurier - Tumblr Posts
They went out laughing into the warm soft night, and the magic was about them everywhere.
Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.
Daphne Du Maurier, from Rebecca
Feuer! Feuer! Manderley in Flammen! Rettet, was ihr tragen könnt, schneller, schneller, schneller!
“Come as enemy or friend, that does not matter to me. You shall be the millstone round my neck, and I’ll like you the better for it.”
— Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn, 1936
“Just after seven the rain began to fall. Gently at first, a light pattering in the trees, and so thin I could not see it. Then louder and faster, a driving torrent falling slant ways from the slate sky, […]. I left the windows open wide. I stood in front of them and breathed the cold clean air. The rain splashed into my face and on my hands. I could not see beyond the lawns, the falling rain came thick and fast. I heard it sputtering in the gutter-pipes above the window, and splashing on the stones of the terrace. There was no more thunder. The rain smelt of moss and earth and of the black bark of trees.”
— Daphne du Maurier, from “Rebecca”, first published in 1938.
“‘Time was’, he said casually, 'when you were not bored either by me or by my conversation’. 'You flatter yourself’.”
— Daphne du Maurier, from ‘Frenchman’s Creek’, first published in 1941. (via eligendo)
gotta love the muppets
they should have adapted daphne du maurier's rebecca with the muppets
“What a delightful speech,” he said. “The Cornish air has made you almost venomous. Or possibly it is the result of the fever.”
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (via wholesomeobsessive)
“Do you like it?” he said, and she nodded, laughing up at him, so that he smiled an instant, looking towards the sea. As he did so she was filled with a great triumph and a sudden ecstasy, for she knew then that he was hers, and she loved him, and that it was something she had known from the very beginning, from the first moment when she had walked into his cabin and found him sitting at the table drawing the heron. Or before that even, when she had seen the ship on the horizon stealing in towards the land, she had known then that this thing was to happen, that nothing could prevent it; she was part of his body and part of his mind, they belonged to each other, both wanderers, both fugitives, cast in the same mould.
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (via wholesomeobsessive)
“Shall we build a fire again, and cook supper, in the creek?” he said to her, reading her thoughts. “Yes,” she said, “on the quay there, like we did before,” and leaning against him, watching the thin line of the coast becoming harder and more distinct, she thought of the other supper they had cooked together, and of the little shyness and restraint between them then that could never come again, for love was a thing of such simplicity once it was shared, and admitted, and done, with all the joy intensified and all the fever gone.
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (via wholesomeobsessive)
Today there are many voices to blunder in upon the silence. The pleasure steamers come and go, leaving a churning wake, and yachtsmen visit one another, and even the day-tripper, his dull eye surfeited with undigested beauty, ploughs in and out amongst the shallows, a prawning net in hand.
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (via wholesomeobsessive)
He is not so large a man as myself, for instance, and like all Frenchmen, has a sly rather than an ugly face.
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (via wholesomeobsessive)
Dona trailed her hand a moment in the water, which was warm, with a velvet softness about it, the phosphorescence gleaming like a shower of stars, and she thought, smiling to herself in the darkness, that at last she was playing the part of a boy, which as a child she had so often longed to be, watching her brothers ride off with her father, and she gazing after them with resentful eyes, a doll thrown aside on the floor in disgust.
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (via wholesomeobsessive)
She wished she were someone else, whistling carelessly, hands stuck into breeches pockets, discussing with the captain of the ship the schemes and possibilities of the coming night, or that he was different, another personality, someone for whom she felt no concern, instead of being the one man in the world she loved and wanted. And there was a flame of anger in her suddenly, that she, who had laughed at love and scorned the sentimental, should be brought, in so few weeks, to such shaming degradation, to such despicable weakness.
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne Du Maurier (via wholesomeobsessive)
She had played too long a part unworthy of her. She had consented to be the Dona her world had demanded - a superficial, lovely creature, who walked, and talked, and laughed, accepting praise and admiration with a shrug of the shoulder as natural homage to her beauty, careless, insolent, deliberately indifferent, and all the while another Dona, a strange, phantom Dona, peered at her from a dark mirror and was ashamed.
Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne du Maurier. (via the-library-and-step-on-it)
She was obeying an impulse, of course, as she always had done, from the beginning, throughout her life, following a whisper, a suggestion, that sprang into being from nowhere and mocked her afterwards.
Daphné du Maurier, Frenchman’s Creek (via antigonick)
Love, as she knew it now, was something without shame and without reserve, the possession of two people who had no barrier between them, and no pride; whatever happened to him would happen to her too, all feeling, all movement, all sensation of body and of mind.
Daphné du Maurier, Frenchman’s Creek (via antigonick)
Then out of the sea, like a ball of fire, the sun came hard and red.
Daphne du Maurier, from Frenchman’s Creek (via the-final-sentence)