I'll Never Be Young Again Quotes

“The smell of coffee, white dust, tobacco and burnt bread, flowers with a fragrance of wine, and the crimson fruit, soft and overripe. A girl looking over her bare shoulder, with a flash of a smile, gold ear-rings showing from thick black hair brushed away from her face, long arms, a cigarette between her lips. Night like a great dark blanket, voices murmuring at a street corner, the air warm with tired flowers, and a hum from the sea.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“it was hell how one always wanted a little more”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“They were all gone, these other selves, and they would never come back again.They had vanished, like little thoughts and little dreams, poor has-beens that had lived in me and I in them, now thrown away into the dust, not even lingering as shadows to keep me company.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Here, you think I'm mad, don't you?" "No, Dick, only young.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“The restlessness has gone, the indecision and also the great heights of exultation, the strange depths of desolation. I am secure now, and certain of myself. There is peace and contentment.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Memories are very beautiful things, when you are old”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Once there had been a path across the mountains, and restlessness, and an urge to fight, and a dream of many women, and now there was a home that was my home, and peace, and relaxation, and no dreams but the reality of one woman. I did not know if it was I who had changed, or the world that had changed about me, but so it was, and I could not call back the dreams that had gone from me.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“I wondered why I had ever despised these things, why they had once seemed pitiful and absurd. I wondered why the placidity of a home seemed necessary to me now, and why I no longer yearned for the turmoil of a ship upon the sea.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“It was hopeless the way time did not stand still, not for a fraction of a second, that there was never an occasion when I could grasp the whole intensity of pleasure, examining it, breathing it, holding it softly with my hands and saying: ‘Now I am living, now . . . now . . .’ It was nothing but a series of flashes quivering before my eyes, dancing themselves away”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Jake, I don’t want ever to be old. I want always to get up in the morning and feel there’s something grand lying just ahead of me, round the corner, over a hill. I want always to feel that if I stand still, only for a minute, I’m missing something a few yards away. I don’t want ever to find myself thinking: “What’s the use of going across that street?” That’s the end of everything, Jake, when looking for things doesn’t count any more. When you sit back happily in a chair, content with what you’ve got - that’s being old.’ ‘There’s no need to get that way. It’s your own thoughts that keep you young, Dick. And age hasn’t anything to do with it. It’s a question of your state of mind.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“I was young, and I’d never been hurt before”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“It seemed strange that life must go on without our need for it”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Impossible that they should live while I was no more a part of existence”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“I thought at first somebody was dead, but after a while I saw it was just England.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“When anyone talked about beauty in that way I knew they were doing it for effect. Perhaps she wanted me to think she was intelligent. She had only to open her mouth to show me she was not.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“It seemed strange that things could still be done to me after I was dead, that my body would perhaps be found and handled by people I should never know, that really a little life would go on about me which I should never feel.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Grey put me up for his club. I dine there most evenings. Fellows there have been extraordinarily kind. I go out often, I know many people. Sometimes I remember what Jake said about me being successful one day. I suppose it will come true. It’s all very different, of course, from what I dreamed. But then dreams are apart from the business of living; they are things we shed from us gently as we grow older.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“The spaniel came up to me, sniffing at my legs, and I bent down and stroked his ears. “Well, Micky,” I said, “you surely remember me? Poor old Micky, good old Micky.” “Micky has got very fat,” said my mother. “Yes,” I said. “Micky is fond of his food,” said Grey. There was another pause and I went on stroking the spaniel’s ears.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“The poet’s insight into the unchanging spirit of humanity.…” “Insight” was a good word. My father was great on insight. I had lived with him for twenty years and I ought to know. “His intimate understanding of the deep unspoken desires that lie sleeping in the breast of every one of us.…” So the papers said. I thought of him turning his eyes upon me in the dining room at home: “Yes, Richard must bicycle into Lessington.” Intimate understanding, and I pedaling down the hard main road. What a lot of insight that turned out to be!”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“I scanned the criticisms of recent books to see if there were any that resembled mine. I resented them all; it seemed to me too many people wrote in England, too many people had ideas.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“The voice told me that it was my father who was to blame. He was responsible for this moment, this business of me dejected, helpless, sitting on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur. It was heredity, environment, upbringing, misunderstanding, all these clashing against each other making me what I was. It was his fault; it had nothing to do with my will or my desires.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“This was my picture, and I wanted to become part of it too, to sleep there with the others on the shore, but they would not let me. I had to go away and live my life. I had no business to remain there lost in a dream. I had to break my mind away from it, I had to cover it, sadly, reverently, hide it in the shadowed untouched places of my memory. I would never forget. I would never permit my picture to become dusty and worn. After all that had been and all that was to come, I should still see it, the rugged cliffs, the little lighthouse standing beyond the razor edge of the Pointe du Raz, the broken Romanie desolate, alone, and lastly, beautiful and forlorn, the sleeping figures in the Baie des Trépassés.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Jake did not say anything; he looked up at the sky and the wall of gray mist ahead of us, he watched the stern of the Romanie lift sluggishly to the high sea. “Dick,” he said later, “do you notice how she wallows in it like something tired of the struggle? She hasn’t got any kick left; she wants to lay down her head and die.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“I would forget my own beating heart, my own trembling body, my own sense of inexpiable degradation. I got up and started to throw off my things. Then the door opened and Jake came into the cabin. I did not want to look at him at first. I turned my back and fumbled with the tap of the basin. He did not say anything either. I whistled a tune under my breath. I wished he had been drunk, or laughing, or cursing, or in some way dragging himself down to my level.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“It was sinister, overpowering; it was like a troubled dream conjured by the evil thoughts of a past day. There was no suggestion of ultimate hope, and no possibility of escape. It was a terrible place. I sat up on the deck with my chin in my hands, looking in front of me thinking of nothing, my heart heavy, longing for some nameless thing that I could not explain even to myself. I did not want to feel depressed like this. I wanted to laugh, and not to care about a thought, and to be with people who did not matter, and to have some fun taking that girl ashore. I did not want to be in a lost mood, wretched and distressed. I wished Gudvangen was different, and the mountains wider apart, and the sun shining in a clear sky, and the blue water warm and shallow.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“There’s no need to get that way. It’s your own thoughts that keep you young, Dick. And age hasn’t anything to do with it. It’s a question of your state of mind.” “I don’t care about all that. Oh! Jake—if I could live tremendously, and then die.” “What do you call ‘tremendously’?” “I don’t know—but there are a whole lot of things I want to know and to feel. They won’t ever happen though. Fate’ll be against me.” “Don’t talk like a fool. There isn’t such a thing as Fate. Everything depends on yourself,” he said. “Everything?” “Yes.” “I wish I could”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“I listened—much as you’re listening now, Dick, but it wasn’t from curiosity, it was something more. I hated the thought of this world that must be lived in—the sordid pitiful lives of men and women, who can’t get beyond their own bodies. I could see this girl, living as she did without the excuse of poverty—she wasn’t any prostitute having to keep herself, but spoiling her beauty, her health, and her own precious individuality, which is greater than anything in life, Dick, because some man had taught her to be self-indulgent. There wasn’t anything more in it than that.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“Then I was glad of the presence of Jake near to me at all times, for a horror would come upon me because of the vast solitude of space and the solitary splendor of the regions where we were drifting; even the white stars seemed cold and terribly remote, and we, poor human beings on our little ship, were wretched and pathetic in our attempts to equal their wisdom, nor had we any right to venture upon the imperturbability of these waters.”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again

“You talked to me of being young,” I said to Jake, “you talked this evening on the bridge of losing something I would never understand. Don’t you see what all that has meant to me? I was a boy without the life of a boy. Being young means bondage to me, it means a gaping sepulcher of a house smelling of dust and decay, it means people I have never loved living apart from me in a world of their own where there’s no time, it means the stifling personality of my father crushing the spirit of his son, it”
― Daphne du Maurier, I'll Never Be Young Again