The Book and the Movie | My Cousin Rachel | Daphne du Maurier, 1951 / Henry Koster, 1952

Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, 1951 / My Cousin Rachel, 1952 Dir. Henry Koster

“The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.”

“Truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.”

“There is no going back in life, no return, no second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed.”

“The expression on her face was ageless, haunting, as though she possessed in her lithe body an old soul that could not die; centuries in time looked out from those two eyes, she had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.”

“He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world…all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate — call it what you will — happened to be me.”

“We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world. Disliking our fellow men, we craved affection; but shyness kept impulse dormant until the heart was touched. When that happened the heavens opened, and we felt, the pair of us, that we have the whole wealth of the universe to give. We would have both survived, had we been other men.”

“I am no traveller, you are my world.”

“In December the first frost came with the full moon, and then my nights of vigil held a quality harder to bear. There was a sort of beauty to them, cold and clear, that caught at the heart and made me stare in wonder. From my windows the long lawns dipped to the meadows, and the meadows to the sea, and all of them were white with frost, and white too under the moon.”

“A lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.”

“How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?”

“People who mattered could not take the humdrum world. But this was not the world, it was enchantment; and all of it was mine.”

“It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.”

“I wondered how it could be that two people who had loved could yet have such a misconception of each other and, with a common grief, grow far apart. There must be something in the nature of love between a man and a woman that drove them to torment and suspicion.”

Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, 1951

My Cousin Rachel (1952)
Director: Henry Koster
Writers: Nunnally Johnson, Daphne Du Maurier
Cinematographer: Joseph LaShelle
Stars: Olivia de Havilland, Richard Burton, Audrey Dalton

Also:
The Book and the Movie: Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier, 1938 / Alfred Hitchcock, 1940
Flick Review < Lady in a Cage | Walter Grauman (1964)
Book//mark – Not After Midnight, 5 long stories | Daphne du Maurier, 1971