Rebecca

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this book! I loved the suspense, the characters, the symbolism, the writing, everything! Besides some of the obvious themes of marriage and the female role, I also enjoyed the emphasis on time and how moments can go too fast, or too slow. How in a moment our lives can change with a proposal or a gunshot, how in a moment you can lose everything or gain it all back. We share moments with the ones we love, where we are the only two people in a crowded room, and there are moments better spent by ourselves drinking in all our surroundings and noticing everything. How all those moments can add up to create sense out of a puzzle, and we can finally see the truth. Will definitely read more du Maurier!

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When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter, patter, of a woman’s hurrying footstep, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled satin shoe.

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. Today, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself.

This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hairpin on a dressing table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hairpin on a dressing table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.

I wondered how it was I could be so happy when our little world about us was so black. It was a strange sort of happiness.

It was ours, inviolate, a fraction of time suspended between two seconds.

but tonight they seemed to take on a special significance, as though the memory of them would last forever and I would say, long after, in some other time, “I remember this moment.”