The House on the Strand Quotes

“To him, the drug released the complex brew within the brain that served up the savored past. To me, it proved that the past was living still, that we were all participants, all witnesses. I was Roger, I was Bodrugan, I was Cain; and in being so was more truly myself.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“Could time be all-dimensional—yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition? Perhaps”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“The world of today asleep, and my world not awakened, or not as yet, until the drug possessed me.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“I was reminded of my first journey as a child in France, traveling by sleeper overnight, throwing open the carriage window in the morning to see foreign fields fly by, villages, towns, figures laboring the land humped like the plowman now, and thinking, with childish wonder, “Are they alive like me, or just pretending?”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“There are few strains more intolerable in life than waiting for the arrival of unwelcome guests.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“I had not awakened from some nostalgic dream . . . Could time be all-dimensional - yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition?”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“The first thing I noticed was the clarity of the air, and then the sharp green colour of the land. There was no softness anywhere. The distant hills did not blend into the sky but stood out like rocks, so close that I could almost touch them, their proximity giving me that shock of surprise and wonder which a child feels looking for the first time through a telescope. Nearer to me, too, each object had the same hard quality, the very grass turning to single blades, springing from a younger, harsher soil than the soil I knew. I had expected - if I had expected anything - a transformation of another kind: a tranquil sense of wellbeing, the blurred intoxication of a dream, with everything about me misty, illdefined; not this tremendous impact, a reality more vivid than anything hitherto experienced, sleeping or awake,”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“So much for women’s value in other days. Goods reared for purchase, then bought and sold in the market-place, or rather manor. Small wonder that, their duty done, they looked round for consolation, either by taking a lover or by playing an active part in the bargaining over their own daughters and sons.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“Three years of marriage,” he said, “and the dishwasher means more to your conjugal life than the double bed I’m throwing in for good measure. I warned you it wouldn’t last. The marriage, I mean, not the bed.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“It doesn’t matter where, providing it’s out of the pull of Roger Kylmerth.”
“My alter ego?” I queried. “He and I are not a scrap alike, you know.”
“Alter egos never are,” he said. “Mine is a long-haired poet who faints at the sight of blood. He’d dogged me ever since I left medical school.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“The world we carry inside us produces answers, sometimes. A way of escape. A flight from reality. You didn’t want to live either in London or New York. The fourteenth century made an exciting, if someone gruesome, antidote to both. The trouble is that daydreams, like hallucinogenic drugs, become addictive; the more we indulge, the deeper we plunge, and then, as I said before, we end in the loony-bin.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“The house was inhabited not by the dead but by the living, and I was the restless wanderer, I was the ghost.
This urge to see, to listen, to move amongst them was so intense that it became intolerable; it was as though my brain had been set alight by some tremendous fire. I could not rest. I could not set myself to any humdrum task in the house or garden; the whole day had gone to waste, and what had promised to be hours of magic were slipping by unused.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House On The Strand

“The house was inhabited not by the dead but by the living, and I was the restless wanderer, I was the ghost.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House On The Strand

“I tried Magnus two or three times later, but there was never a reply, and I spent a restless evening unable to settle to newspapers, books, records, or TV. Finally, fed up with myself and the whole problem, to which there seemed no solution, I went early to bed, and slept, to my astonishment when I awoke next morning, amazingly well.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House On The Strand

“As an eavesdropper in time my role was passive, without commitment or responsibility. I could move about in their world unwatched, knowing that whatever happened I could do nothing to prevent it—comedy, tragedy, or farce—whereas in my twentieth century existence I must take my share in shaping my own future and that of my family.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“I remember asking Mrs. Lane once whether the house was haunted. My question was an idle one, for certainly it did not have a haunted atmosphere—I asked simply because it was old.
“Good heavens, no!” she exclaimed. “We’re far too wrapped up in ourselves to encourage ghosts. Poor things, they’d wither away from tedium, unable to draw attention to themselves.”
― Daphne du Maurier , The House On The Strand

“This greeting of one man to another seemed natural, and the sense of shock that had been part of me since I first saw the horseman at the ford gave place to wonder, then acceptance. I was reminded of my first journey as a child in France, traveling by sleeper overnight, throwing open the carriage window in the morning to see foreign fields fly by, villages, towns, figures laboring the land humped like the plowman now, and thinking, with childish wonder, “Are they alive like me, or just pretending?”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House On The Strand

“The entrance gate at the far end of the quadrangle was open wide, and beyond it I could see a mass of people assembled on the green, men, women, children.The shouting was coming from them, and the creaking sounds were the wheels of an enormous covered wagon drawn by five horses, the second leader and the horse between the shafts carrying riders upon their backs. The wooden canopy”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“This, I think, was the essence of what it meant to me. To be bound, yet free; to be alone, yet in their company; to be born in my own time yet living, unknown, in theirs.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“What they had dreamed of, schemed for, accomplished, no longer mattered, it was all forgotten.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand

“When I lie I like to base the lie on a foundation of fact, for it appeases not only conscience but a sense of justice.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand