Top 100 Quotes About Shirley Jackson
#1. Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.
Victor LaValle
#2. Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.
Anne Lamott
#3. And if it played its cards right they could end up flitting through the Overlook's halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but you wouldn't be alone in the Overlook, oh no, there would be plenty of company here.
Stephen King
#4. I've been a fan of vampire fiction since way, way back - I loved Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Shirley Jackson, lots of great horror and paranormal fiction.
Rachel Caine
#5. The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable,
A.M. Homes
#6. Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#7. The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.
Victor LaValle
#8. THE THREE is really wonderful. A mix of Michael Crichton and Shirley Jackson, hard to put down and vastly entertaining.
Stephen King
#9. Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.
Victor LaValle
#10. 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
#11. [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
#12. The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf.
Shirley Jackson
#13. Although she would sooner have given up thinking than eating, she resented being pushed into depriving herself of either.
Shirley Jackson
#14. You never know what you are going to want until you see it clearly.
Shirley Jackson
#15. Therefore it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food.
Shirley Jackson
#16. Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.
Shirley Jackson
#17. Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?
Shirley Jackson
#18. 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
#19. Why do women always look so funny alone at night? she thought. I guess you're so used to seeing them with someone.
Shirley Jackson
#20. I clear breakfast at ten o'clock. I set on lunch at one. Dinner I set on at six. It's ten o'clock.
Shirley Jackson
#21. All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this ...
Shirley Jackson
#23. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Shirley Jackson
#24. I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.
Shirley Jackson
#25. Everything is worse ... if you think something is looking at you.
Shirley Jackson
#26. My dear, how can I make you perceive that there is no danger where there is nothing but love and understanding?
Shirley Jackson
#27. Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.
Shirley Jackson
#28. When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.
Shirley Jackson
#29. 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
#30. Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, 'I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,' and when Brad said, 'What starts to happen?' she said hysterically, 'People starting to come apart.
Shirley Jackson
#31. 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
#32. Constance could put names to all the growing things, but I was content to know them by their way and place of growing, and their unfailing offers of refuge.
Shirley Jackson
#34. Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts.
Shirley Jackson
#35. 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
#36. Remember the metallic sound and taste of all of it. And the outrage.
Shirley Jackson
#37. It's not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.
Shirley Jackson
#38. I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
Shirley Jackson
#39. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Shirley Jackson
#40. Those crazy physicists that spend all day cooking themselves under an atomic reactor and all night writing stories for Weird World have done it. Spoiled my day completely. One of those idiots has hung the world up like a celluloid ball in an airstream.
Shirley Jackson
#42. I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
Shirley Jackson
#43. We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others;
Shirley Jackson
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Well, she asked, how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house?
It's perfectly fine, Luke said, perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.
Shirley Jackson
#49. People like answering questions about themselves, she thought; what an odd pleasure it is. I would answer anything right now. "What
Shirley Jackson
#50. Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations--visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment.
Shirley Jackson
#51. When we had neatened the upstairs rooms we came downstairs together, carrying our dustcloths and the broom and dustpan and mop like a pair of witches walking home.
Shirley Jackson
#53. That's wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn't ever talk about whether people like you, that's bad taste.
Shirley Jackson
#54. 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
#55. The rain started while we sat in the kitchen, and we left the kitchen door open so we could watch the rain slanting past the doorway and washing the garden; Constance was pleased, the way any good gardener is pleased with rain.
Shirley Jackson
#56. 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
#58. The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
Shirley Jackson
#59. I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it's dull no-one should have to read it anyway, and if it's interesting I should be using it for a story.
Shirley Jackson
#60. I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.
Shirley Jackson
#61. So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.
Shirley Jackson
#62. No, she thought, you are not going to catch me so cheaply; I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings; this man is a parrot.
Shirley Jackson
#63. 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
#64. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like
Shirley Jackson
#66. I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.
Shirley Jackson
#67. 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
#69. People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.
("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1)
Shirley Jackson
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#75. I dined upon a bird, and radishes from the garden, and homemade plum jam.
Shirley Jackson
#76. The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain, said Lord Byron,
Shirley Jackson
#77. The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable
Shirley Jackson
#78. Say Morg
you mind if I use the rest of your bath salts? There's only a little left.
Shirley Jackson
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Brown, they would later write, had taught them that the goal of reading and criticizing was "to know and understand, not to like or dislike, and the aim of writing was to get down what you wanted to say, not to gesticulate or impress.
Ruth Franklin
#83. The food comes from the ground and cant' be permitted to stay there and rot; something has to be done with it.
Shirley Jackson
#84. 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
#85. --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
#86. I think we are only afraid of ourselves," the doctor said slowly.
"No," Luke said. "Of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise.
Shirley Jackson
#87. Anything you raise by the way of spirits you have to put back yourself.
Shirley Jackson
#88. Perhaps someone had once hoped to lighten the air of the blue room in Hill House with a dainty wallpaper, not seeing how such a hope would evaporate in Hill House, leaving only the faintest hint of its existence, like an almost inaudible echo of sobbing far away...
Shirley Jackson
#89. Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
Shirley Jackson
#90. I like writing fiction better than anything, because just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words.
Shirley Jackson
#91. Nothing," she said, "upsets me more than being hungry; I snarl and snap and burst into tears.
Shirley Jackson
#92. I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.'
'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.
Shirley Jackson
#93. I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.
Shirley Jackson
#94. At my age an hour's reading before bedtime is essential, and I wisely brought Pamela with me. If any of you has trouble sleeping, I will read aloud to you. I never yet knew anyone who could not fall asleep with Richardson being read aloud to him.
Shirley Jackson
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.
Shirley Jackson
#98. When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them.
Shirley Jackson
#99. 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
#100. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Shirley Jackson
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