Top 100 Shirley Jackson Quotes
#1. It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before father's death on a cold wet day.
Shirley Jackson
#2. [L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch ...
Shirley Jackson
#3. Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?
Shirley Jackson
#4. All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.
Shirley Jackson
#5. All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this ...
Shirley Jackson
#7. Everything is worse ... if you think something is looking at you.
Shirley Jackson
#8. Don't be so afraid all the time," she said and reached out to touch Eleanor's cheek with one finger. "We never know where our courage is coming from.
Shirley Jackson
#9. Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.
Shirley Jackson
#11. We couldn't even hear you, in the night ...
No one could. No one lives any nearer than town. No one else will come any nearer than that."
"I know," Eleanor said tiredly.
"In the night," Mrs. Dudley said, and smiled outright. "In the dark," she said..
Shirley Jackson
#12. Remember the metallic sound and taste of all of it. And the outrage.
Shirley Jackson
#13. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.
Shirley Jackson
#14. He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting.
Shirley Jackson
#15. Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and in her art (an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch," and
Shirley Jackson
#16. People like answering questions about themselves, she thought; what an odd pleasure it is. I would answer anything right now. "What
Shirley Jackson
#18. She was well away from the city now, watching for the turning onto Route 39, that magic thread of road Dr. Montague had chosen for her, out of all the roads in the world, to bring her safely to him and to Hill House; no other road could lead her from where she was to where she wanted to be.
Shirley Jackson
#19. Perhaps the village was really a great game board, with the squares neatly marked out, and I had been moved past the square which read 'Fire; return to Start,' and was now on the last few squares, with only one move to go to reach home.
Shirley Jackson
#21. The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
Shirley Jackson
#22. So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.
Shirley Jackson
#23. Jonas," I told him, "you are not to listen any more to Cousin Charles," and Jonas regarded me in wide-eyed astonishment, that I should attempt to make decisions for him.
Shirley Jackson
#24. I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.
Shirley Jackson
#25. It was one of those winter days that suddenly dream of spring, when the sky is blue and soft and clear, and the wind has dropped its voice and whispers instead of screaming, and the sun is out and the trees look surprised, and over everything there is the faintest, palest tint of green.
Shirley Jackson
#26. People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.
("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1)
Shirley Jackson
#27. I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.
Shirley Jackson
#28. Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker ... [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?
Shirley Jackson
#29. I don't like the younger sister,' Theodora said. 'First she stole her sister's lover, and then she tried to steal her sister's dishes.
Shirley Jackson
#31. I dined upon a bird, and radishes from the garden, and homemade plum jam.
Shirley Jackson
#32. The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain, said Lord Byron,
Shirley Jackson
#33. In the darkness their feet felt that they were going downhill, and each privately and perversely accused the other of taking, deliberately, a path they had followed together once before in happiness.
Shirley Jackson
#34. Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
Shirley Jackson
#35. I thought that we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale.
Shirley Jackson
#36. We relied upon Constance for various small delicacies which only she could provide; I am of course not referring to arsenic.'
'Well, the blackberries were the most important part.' Mrs. Wright sounded a little hoarse.
Shirley Jackson
#37. --spring lamb roasted, with a mint jelly made from Constance's garden mint. Spring potatoes, new peas, a salad, again from Constance's garden. I remember it perfectly, madam. It is still one of my favorite meals.
Shirley Jackson
#38. Anything you raise by the way of spirits you have to put back yourself.
Shirley Jackson
#39. Nothing," she said, "upsets me more than being hungry; I snarl and snap and burst into tears.
Shirley Jackson
#40. I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.'
'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.
Shirley Jackson
#41. o live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill
Shirley Jackson
#42. It is not possible, I frequently think, to walk down the street as fast as you can and kick yourself at the same time.
Shirley Jackson
#43. I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.
Shirley Jackson
#44. When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them.
Shirley Jackson
#45. I would not touch the ring; the thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of, but I liked the watch chain, which twisted and wound around my hand when I picked it up.
Shirley Jackson
#46. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Shirley Jackson
#47. this was a time and a land where enchantments were swiftly made and broken
Shirley Jackson
#48. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
Shirley Jackson
#49. We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.
Shirley Jackson
#50. I live a mad, abandoned life, draped in a shawl and going from garret to garret.
Shirley Jackson
#51. I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes.
Shirley Jackson
#52. It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a 4-day vacation, the thin veneer of family wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities.
Shirley Jackson
#53. Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!
Shirley Jackson
#54. In all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
Shirley Jackson
#55. Outside were the eucalyptus trees, like lace against the sky. If it were only possible to lie against them, light and bodiless, sink into their softness, deeper and deeper, lost in them, buried, never come back again ...
Shirley Jackson
#56. The least Charles could have done,' Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.
Shirley Jackson
#57. Sally at this time gave up any notion of being a co-operative member of a family, named herself "Tiger" and settled down to an unceasing, and seemingly endless, war against clothes, toothbrushes, all green vegetables, and bed.
Shirley Jackson
#58. We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.
Shirley Jackson
#59. It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.
Shirley Jackson
#60. I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
Shirley Jackson
#61. Tod Donald rarely did anything voluntarily, or with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself; he found himself doing one thing, and then he found himself doing another, and that, as he saw it, was the way one lived along, never deciding, never helping.
Shirley Jackson
#63. On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.
Shirley Jackson
#64. It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.
Shirley Jackson
#65. Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else.
Shirley Jackson
#66. If I am spared," he always said to Constance, "I will write the book myself. If not, see that my notes are entrusted to some worthy cynic who will not be too concerned with the truth.
Shirley Jackson
#67. I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.
Shirley Jackson
#68. People," the doctor said sadly, "are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.
Shirley Jackson
#69. I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.
Shirley Jackson
#70. Sister's gone to school," I said to Sally.
"Ah," said Sally. "And will she come home again?
Shirley Jackson
#71. During all of dinner the singing went on upstairs, and no one said a word.
Shirley Jackson
#72. Can't you make them stop?' I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love.
Shirley Jackson
#73. Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.
Shirley Jackson
#74. I could help her in her shop, Eleanor thought; she loves beautiful things and I would go with her to find them. We could go anywhere we pleased, to the edge of the world if we liked, and come back when we wanted to.
Shirley Jackson
#75. Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.
Shirley Jackson
#76. What was wrong with Mrs Blackwood doing her own cooking"
"Please" (...) "I personally preferred the arsenic".
Shirley Jackson
#77. There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.
Shirley Jackson
#78. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.
Shirley Jackson
#79. I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come.
Shirley Jackson
#80. Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said.
Shirley Jackson
#82. Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup
of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone
else you will never see your cup of stars again
Shirley Jackson
#83. (an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch,
Shirley Jackson
#84. Perhaps the fire had destroyed everything and we would go back tomorrow and find that the past six years had been burned and they were waiting for us, sitting around the dining-room table waiting for Constance to bring them their dinner.
Shirley Jackson
#85. Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.
Shirley Jackson
#86. I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon.
Shirley Jackson
#87. For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.
Shirley Jackson
#88. Someday," she said evilly, rubbing her hands against her eyes, "I am going to get my eyes open all the time and then I will eat you and Lizzie both.
Shirley Jackson
#90. In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.
Shirley Jackson
#91. You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?
Shirley Jackson
#93. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.
Shirley Jackson
#96. Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.
Shirley Jackson
#97. Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children ...
Shirley Jackson
#98. Tell me something that only I will ever know, was perhaps what she wanted to ask him, or, What will you give me to remember you by? - or, even, Nothing of the least importance has ever belonged to me; can you help?
Shirley Jackson
#99. She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method - imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.
Shirley Jackson
#100. Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?
Shirley Jackson
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