Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.
That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.
How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?
There is no going back in life, no return, no second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed.
Her dullness made her own punishment.
The relief was tremendous. I did not feel sick anymore. The pain had gone...I had no idea I was so empty.
Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. --from a Difference in Temperament.
Because I believe there is nothing so self-destroying, and no emotion quite so despicable, as jealousy.
We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.
I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album. Those roof-tops and that sea were mine no more. They belonged to yesterday, to the past.
Now you are here, let me show you everything," she said, her voice ingratiating and sweet as honey, horrible, false, "I know you want to see it all, you've wanted to for a long time, and you were too shy to ask. It's a lovely room, isn't it? The loveliest room you have ever seen.
I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.
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.
You're all wounded and hurt and torn inside.
Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.
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.
He was folding up his napkin, pushing back his plate, and I wondered how it was he spoke so casually, as thought the matter was of little consequence, a mere adjustment of plans. Whereas to me it was a bombshell, exploding in a thousand tiny fragments.
Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.
Men are simpler than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.
I wondered how it could be that two people who had loved could yet have such a misconception of each other and, with a common grief, grow far apart. There must be something in the nature of love between a man and a woman that drove them to torment and suspicion.
It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.
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.
There was a silence on the tors that belonged to another age; an age that is past and vanished as though it had never been, an age when man did not exist, but pagan footsteps trod upon the hills. And there was a stillness in the air, and a stranger, older peace, that was not the peace of God.
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.
Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what-has-been, the suffering, the joy?
The visitors sat down, languid, and content to rest. Seecombe brought cake and wine.
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. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundations, and one is so easily bruised, so sift wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.
It was a day to be inside somewhere, cosseted and loved; by a warm fireside with the clatter of friendly cups and saucers, a sleepy cat licking his paws, a cyclamen in a pot on a windowsill putting forth new buds.
A woman of feeling does not easily give way. You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender. We have our wars and battles, Mr. Ashey. But women can fight too.
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.
The fact that it's black transforms it. Has the same effect on women that black stockings have on men.
Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers.
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us.
Dead men tell no tales, Mary.
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.
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.
If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.
I have no great opinion of the human race. It is just as well, now and again, that we have wars, so that men know what it is to suffer pain. One day they will exterminate themselves, as they have exterminated the rabbits. So much the better. The world will be peaceful again, with nothing left but the forest over there, and the soil.
Experience, Major Dodd, has long informed me that no man ever expresses admiration unless he wants something out of the person admired. That's a very cynical view. I'm a cynical woman.
Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered.
If you think I'm one of those people who try to be funny at breakfast you're wrong.
A man's jealousy is like a child's, fitful and foolish, without depth. A woman's jealousy is adult, which is very different.
I know that age, it's a particularly obstinate one, and a thousand bogies won't make you fear the future. A pity we can't change over.
It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.
It's funny, I thought, how 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.
