The Loving Spirit Quotes

“The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows. Now warm, now chill, next joyous, then despairing, the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him, no matter how stable, even loving. No ties, no binding chains, save those he forges for himself. Or so he thinks. But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it. Therefore create. Act God. Fashion men and women as Prometheus fashioned them from clay, and, by doing this, work out the unconscious strife within and be reconciled. While in others, imbued with a desire to mold, to instruct, to spread a message that will inspire the reader and so change his world, though the motive may be humane and even noble--many great works have done just this--the source is the same dissatisfaction, a yearning to escape.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“Dust unto dust. There was no reason then for life—it was only a fraction of a moment between birth and death, a movement upon the surface of water, and then it was still. Janet had loved and suffered, she had known beauty and pain, and now she was finished—blotted by the heedless earth, to be no more than a few dull letters on a stone. Joseph”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“Samuel had strengthened the blood-tie between them, but no more than this. They would cherish each other in sickness and in health, walk through life sharing its pleasures and its sorrows, sleep side by side at night in the little room above the porch, grow old and frail, resting at last, not parted, in Lanoc Churchyard—but from the beginning to the end they would have no knowledge of one another. Janet’s feeling for Samuel ran parallel to her feeling for Thomas. The one was her husband, the other was her child. Samuel depended on her for care and for comfort until he should grow old enough to look after himself. She washed him and dressed him, seated him beside her in his high chair at table and fed him, helped him with his first steps and his first words, gave him all the tenderness and the affection he demanded from her. She gave to both Thomas and Samuel her natural spontaneity of feeling and a great simplicity of heart; but the spirit of Janet was free and unfettered, waiting to rise from its self-enforced seclusion to mingle with intangible things, like the wind, the sea, and the skies, hand in hand with the one for whom she waited. Then she, too, would become part of these things forever, abstract and immortal. Because”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“I’ll not bide in Heaven, nor rest here in my grave. My spirit will linger with the ones I love—an’ when they’re sorrowful and feared in themselves, I’ll come to them; and God Himself won’t keep me.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“Jennifer had exactly five pounds, six shillings, and fourpence halfpenny when she left No. 7 Maple Street. She lugged her two suitcases along with her into various buses, and arrived at Paddington with three-quarters of an hour to wait before the twelve o’clock train should bear her away from London forever. Thirty-two shillings and sixpence of her capital went on her third-class ticket, and three shillings more on a cup of coffee, two rashers of bacon, and a banana, for she had eaten no breakfast. During this wait she had time to think over her crazy flight from the boardinghouse. It had been her home since she was six years old, and she had left her mother without one pang of regret. “I must be terribly unnatural,” thought Jennifer sadly. “But it can’t be helped. I was probably born without a heart; I believe some people are.” She”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“Often rebuked, yet always back returning To those first feelings that were born with me, And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning For idle dreams of things which cannot be; I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces, And not in paths of high morality, And not among the half-distinguished faces, The clouded forms of long-past history. I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading; It vexes me to choose another guide: Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding; Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side. E. BRONTË”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“It seemed to Jennifer that she had sat in the cellar from the beginning of things, that never, since she could remember, had there been anything in her life but this. One day, so she was told, it would be ended. One day there would be no war.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit

“Though Thomas liked to think he had his own way over things, it was generally Janet who had the last say in the matter. She would fling a word at her husband and no more, and he would go off to his work with an uneasy feeling at the back of his mind that she had won. He called it “giving in to Janie,” but it was more than that, it was unconscious subservience to a quieter but stronger personality than his own.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Loving Spirit