Trilby and Other Works Quotes

“The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes—one believes at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in sheer human sympathy!”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“The whole cosmos is in a man's brains—as much of it, at least, as a man's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleep relaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distract attention—no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it—riderless Fancy takes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has its wild will of us.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“She had no remembrance of my name, or the Seraskiers'—I asked, with a beating heart. We had left no trace. Twelve short years had effaced all memory of us!”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of blankness and bereavement. But how about the avenue and my old home? I hastened back to the Rue de la Pompe with the quick step of aroused anxiety. The avenue was gone—blocked within a dozen yards of the gate by a huge brick building covered with newly-painted trellis-work! My old house was no more, but in its place a much larger and smarter edifice of sculptured stone.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“And we, of the middle class, we stick to our order, too, and do not mingle with the small shop-keepers—who do not mingle with the laborers, artisans, and mechanics—who (alas, for them!) have nobody to look down upon but each other—but they do not; and are the best-bred people in the place.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“For we have a young lord and a middle-aged baronet—a shocking pair, who should not be allowed to live; but for family influence they would be doing their twenty years' penal servitude in jail, instead of living comfortably sequestered here. Like Ouida's high-born heroes, they "stick to their order," and do not mingle with the rest of us. They ignore us so completely that we cannot help looking up to them in spite of their vices—just as we should do outside.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated, respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned, but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used to "the society of ladies and gentlemen." Were it not for this, they would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded, trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether "quite a gentleman." I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide that to each other.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“But he died of distemper when he was eleven months old. I do not know if little dogs cause as large griefs when they die as big ones; but I settled there should be no more dogs—big or little—for me.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“But I had no gift for making friends, although I was often attracted by people the very opposite of myself; especially by little, clever, quick, but not too familiar men; but even if they were disposed to make advances, a miserable shyness and stiffness of manner on my part, that I could not help, would raise a barrier of ice between us.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise; and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I ever even desired to think or feel otherwise, however personally despairing of this life—a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my best instincts. And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy; and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame. At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and unreasonable, as I found; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and its light was not a kindly light.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“Some types are born and not made. I was a born "infidel;" if ever there was a congenital agnostic, one agnostically constituted from his very birth, it was I. Not that I had ever heard such an expression as agnosticism; it is an invention of late years….”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“I have left out much, but I feel that in suppressing it altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance; for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents (otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is "Wax to receive, marble to retain." Madge Plunket.]”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“My old love for slums revived, and I found out and haunted the worst in London. They were very good slums, but they were not the slums of Paris—they manage these things better in France.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“They even took a pride in a sick headache, and liked it, if it were the result of a debauch on the previous night; and were as pompously mock-modest about a black eye, got in a squabble at the Argyll Rooms, as if it had been the Victoria Cross. To pass the night in a police cell was such glory that it was worth while pretending they had done so when it was untrue.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“Occasionally, too, and quite unbidden, it would warble little impromptu inward melodies of my own composition, which often seemed to me extremely pretty, old-fashioned, and quaint; but one is not a fair judge of one's own productions, especially during the heat of inspiration; and I had not the means of recording them, as I had never learned the musical notes. What the world has lost! Now whose this small voice was I did not find out till many years later, for it was not mine!”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“I am never without some tune running in my head—never for a moment; not that I am always aware of it; existence would be insupportable if I were. What part of my brain sings it, or rather in what part of my brain it sings itself, I cannot imagine—probably in some useless corner full of cobwebs and lumber that is fit for nothing else.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“This vanity had increased with years and assumed a very dangerous form. He became indiscreet, and, more disastrous still, he told lies! The very dead—the honored and irreproachable dead—were not even safe in their graves. It was his revenge for unforgotten slights. He who kisses and tells, he who tells even though he has not kissed—what can be said for him, what should be done to him?”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“The only beast that ever fell to my gun during those shootings with Uncle Ibbetson was a young rabbit, and that more by accident than design, although I did not tell Uncle Ibbetson so. As I picked it off the ground, and felt its poor little warm narrow chest, and the last beats of its heart under its weak ribs, and saw the blood on its fur, I was smitten with pity, shame, and remorse; and settled with myself that I would find some other road to English gentlemanhood than the slaying of innocent wild things whose happy life seems so well worth living.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffable joys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hidden capacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, to be developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all, wakers and sleepers alike? A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity and duration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalize the sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school. It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those well-spent hours!”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings—the big hospital at the back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the cattle-market—where every other building was either a slaughter-house, a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday morning.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like suspicion of a scent—a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic, synthetic and all-embracing—an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase—I hope it means something), and scents need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes and days gone by.”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris—not the Paris of M. le Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugène Sue and Les Mystères—the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung);”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works

“There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward and spiritual grace;”
― George du Maurier, Trilby and Other Works