Love Quote by Daphne du Maurier

Du Maurier lands the line like a well-aimed paperweight: elegant, a little cruel, and revealing mostly because it’s too neat to fully trust. “Women want love to be a novel” flatters the romance tradition while quietly indicting it. A novel promises immersion, development, motive; it dignifies emotion with architecture. It suggests love should have chapters, reversals, a moral logic that makes suffering feel earned. “Men a short story” cuts the other direction: compression, punch, exit. Not necessarily shallow, but bounded. The subtext is less “women are sentimental, men are casual” than “men and women are trained to demand different narrative contracts from intimacy.”

As a novelist, du Maurier is also talking about form as fate. The novel doesn’t just last longer; it makes meaning by accumulation. A short story can be devastating, even transcendent, but it’s often built around a single effect. In relationships, those are competing aesthetics: one person wants an epic of becoming; the other wants a clean, final turn.

Context matters: du Maurier wrote in a 20th-century Britain where women’s social scripts still leaned heavily on romantic destiny, while men were granted mobility, discretion, and the privilege of under-explaining themselves. Read alongside her own work - full of obsession, secrecy, and the costs of longing - the line feels less like a joke about gender and more like a warning about narrative mismatch: the tragedy of two people loving each other in incompatible genres.