But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.
Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
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.
I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.
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.
Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.
Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with me." "Do you mean you want a secretary or something?" "No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
We're not meant for happiness, you and I.
I have no talent for making new friends, but oh such genius for fidelity to old ones.
Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.
There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.
...the routine of life goes on, whatever happens, we do the same things, go through the little performance of eating, sleeping, washing. No crisis can break through the crust of habit.
It wouldn't make for sanity would it, living with the devil.
Come and see us if you feel like it,' she said. 'I always expect people to ask themselves. Life is too short to send out invitations.
I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire.
Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?
The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.
I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.
A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.
Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.
Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear
Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.
Why this man should love that woman, what queer chemical mix-up in our blood draws us to one another, who can tell?
I had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.
The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.
We are all ghosts of yesterday, and the phantom of tomorrow awaits us alike in sunshine or in shadow, dimly perceived at times, never entirely lost.
She knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live.
I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.
Dead men tell no tales, Mary.
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.
I would have gone too but I wanted to come straight back to you.I kept thinking of you, waiting here, all by yourself, not knowing what was going to happen.
We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
I don't mind. I like being alone.
...but I should say that kindliness, and sincerity, and if I may say so--modesty--are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.
We've got a bond in common, you and I. We are both alone in the world.
And this then, that I am feeling now, is the hell that comes with love, the hell and the damnation and the agony beyond all enduring, because after the beauty and the loveliness comes the sorrow and the pain.
There is no going back in life, no return, no second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed.
... and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace.
When she smiled it was as though she embraced the world.
You understand now... how simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten.
Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone.
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.
How lacking in intuition men could be in persuading themselves that mending some stranger's socks, and attending to his comfort, could content a woman...
He stole horses' you'll say to yourself, 'and he didn't care for women; and but for my pride I'd have been with him now.
I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.
I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.
I wonder ... when it was that the world first went amiss, and men forgot how to live and to love and to be happy.
An empty house can be as lonely as a full hotel" he said at length."The trouble is that it is less impersonal.
Watch that boy. He's going to startle somebody someday.
No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.
What degradation lay in being young.
A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work.
Why, he wondered, should he remember her suddenly, on such a day, watching the rain falling on the apple trees?
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.
I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.
People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.
From the very first, I knew that it would be so...I smiled to myself, and said, "That -- and none other.
So you see, when war comes to one’s village, one’s doorstep, it isn’t tragic and impersonal any longer. It is just an excuse to vomit private hatred. That is why I am not a great patriot.
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.
…you guessed that somewhere, in heaven knew what country and what guise, there was someone who was part of your body and your brain, and that without him you were lost, a straw blown by the wind.
If there’s one thing that makes a man sick, it’s to have his ale poured out of an ugly hand.
How pleasant,' Dona said, peeling her fruit; 'the rest of us can only run away from time to time, and however much we pretend to be free, we know it is only for a little while - our hands and our feet are tied.
You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.
I would not be young again, if you offered me the world. But then I'm prejudiced.' 'You talk,' I said, 'as if you were ninety-nine.' 'For a woman I very nearly am,' she said. 'I'm thirty five.
You have blotted out the past for me, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo.
There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair
People who travel are always fugitives.
It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that.
And, though there should be a world of difference between the smile of a man and the bared fangs of a wolf, with Joss Merlyn they were one and the same.
He was young and ardent in a hundred happy ways.
She's dearer than life itself, that's all I know.
But the point is this Monsieur...the reason why Madame complains of you is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious.
As I stood there,hushed and still,I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before.
Maxim's voice, clear and strong, "Will someone take my wife outside?She is going to faint.
She had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.
And he went on eating his marmalade as though everything were natural.
She would have stood by Giles’s side, and shaken hands with people, a smile on her face. I could not do that. I had not the pride, I had not the guts. I was badly bred.
...I will shed no more tears, like a spoilt child. For whatever happens we have had what we have had. No one can take that from us. And I have been alive, who was never alive before.
....but in future keep the things that hurt to myself alone. They can be my secret indulgence.
Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.
The feel of her own pillow, and of her own blankets reassured her. Both were familiar. And being tired was familiar too, it was a solid bodily ache, like the tiredness after too much jumping or cricket.
But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.
I did so obediently, and waited for her approval.
Do you know so little about children, Monsieur Jean,' she asked, 'that you imagine, because they don't cry, therefore they feel nothing? If so, you're much mistaken.
It doesn't make for sanity, does it, living with the devil.
Tact was a quality unknown to her, discretion too, and because gossip was the breath of life to her this stranger must be served for her dissection.
My afternoon had spoilt me for the hours that still remained,
Oh, God, I though, this is like two people in a play, in a moment the curtain will come down, we shall bow to the audience, and go off to our dressing-rooms.
... the inevitable lorgnette, the enemy to other people's privacy.
The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.
Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered.
I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people.
..If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.
...The fact that it's black transforms it. Has the same effect on women that black stockings have on men.
I was like a little scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible.
Les images défilaient par centaines derrière mes yeux fermés, chose vues, choses sues et choses oubliées.
