Mrs. Danvers > Mrs. Danvers's Quotes

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.”
― W.G. Sebald

“The distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781, on Alexander Pope”
― Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1

“Just as the light of a single candle can dispel the darkness of a thousand years, the moment we light a single candle of wisdom, no matter how long or deep our confusion, ignorance is dispelled.”
― Joseph Goldstein

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim "the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude," and it was characteristic of Charlotte that whenever the phrase "realistic but optimistic" appeared in a school communique she read it as "realistic and optimistic.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it”
― John Keats