Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Shirley Jackson, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Shirley Jackson quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 190 Shirley Jackson quotes for you to read and share.

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He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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...you'd think my own face would know me... -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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You never know what you are going to want until you see it clearly. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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[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
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I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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Remember the metallic sound and taste of all of it. And the outrage. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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That's wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn't ever talk about whether people like you, that's bad taste. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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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
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We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place
we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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I live a mad, abandoned life, draped in a shawl and going from garret to garret. -- Shirley Jackson
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Bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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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
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My dear, how can I make you perceive that there is no danger where there is nothing but love and understanding? -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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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
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I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more. -- Shirley Jackson
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The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books, -- Shirley Jackson
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She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method - imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive. -- Shirley Jackson
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Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. -- Shirley Jackson
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I dined upon a bird, and radishes from the garden, and homemade plum jam. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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It is not proven that Elizabeth's person equilibrium was set off balance by the slant of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elizabeth who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same time. -- Shirley Jackson
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What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight, a lady with a book. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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Although she would sooner have given up thinking than eating, she resented being pushed into depriving herself of either. -- Shirley Jackson
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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don't think I like reality very much. Principally, I don't understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place. -- Shirley Jackson
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...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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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
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Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long. -- Shirley Jackson
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And we held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky.
'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.'
'I told you that you would like it on the moon. -- Shirley Jackson
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She wants her cup of stars." Eleanor -- Shirley Jackson
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Anything you raise by the way of spirits you have to put back yourself. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons. -- Shirley Jackson
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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you. -- Shirley Jackson
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It was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant. -- Shirley Jackson
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God! Whose hand was I holding? -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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Morgan had been, for a very long time, the most remarkable object in her own landscape, and anything stranger than herself was, to her mind, either an obvious sham, or non-existent. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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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
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All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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--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
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Nothing," she said, "upsets me more than being hungry; I snarl and snap and burst into tears. -- Shirley Jackson
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I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village. -- Shirley Jackson
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Everything is worse ... if you think something is looking at you. -- Shirley Jackson
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It's not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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Sister's gone to school," I said to Sally.
"Ah," said Sally. "And will she come home again? -- Shirley Jackson
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February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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Good morning, Jonas. You are a furred lead, I think. -- Shirley Jackson
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On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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On the main street of one village she passed a vast house, pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps, and she thought that perhaps she might live there, dusting the lions each morning and patting their heads good night. -- Shirley Jackson
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Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books. -- Shirley Jackson
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Say Morg
you mind if I use the rest of your bath salts? There's only a little left. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do. -- Shirley Jackson
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Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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although she shook her head. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.'
'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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They walked over to it and Brad bent down gingerly: "It's a leg all right," he said. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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Journeys end in lovers meeting -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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In the country of the story the writer is king. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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Why don't you grow up by yourself? -- Shirley Jackson
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People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.
("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1) -- Shirley Jackson
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I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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Insist on your cup of stars. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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During all of dinner the singing went on upstairs, and no one said a word. -- Shirley Jackson
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When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them. -- Shirley Jackson
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The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain, said Lord Byron, -- Shirley Jackson
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Bridge is a game for the undivided intellect. -- Shirley Jackson
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The least Charles could have done,' Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway. -- Shirley Jackson
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Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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I disliked having a fork pointed at me and I disliked the sound of the voice never stopping; I wished he would put food on the fork and put it into his mouth and strangle himself. -- Shirley Jackson
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I was not allowed to prepare food, nor was I allowed to gather mushrooms... -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four," he said, patting his hands together. "I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie. Constance, my dear?"
"Yes, Uncle Julian?"
"I am going to say that my wife was a beautiful woman. -- Shirley Jackson
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Wear your boots if you wander today -- Shirley Jackson
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The idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely. -- Shirley Jackson
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I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die. -- Shirley Jackson
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Oh Constance, we are so happy. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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An Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends. -- Shirley Jackson
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No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. -- Shirley Jackson
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I think we are only afraid of ourselves," the doctor said slowly.
"No," Luke said. "Of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep! -- Shirley Jackson
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I would not forget my magic words; they were MELODY GLOUCESTER PEGASUS, but I refused to let them into my mind. -- Shirley Jackson
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Some of the people in the village had real faces that I knew and could hate individually; Jim -- Shirley Jackson
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People like answering questions about themselves, she thought; what an odd pleasure it is. I would answer anything right now. "What -- Shirley Jackson
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In all the world there is not someone who does not believe something. -- Shirley Jackson
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Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children. -- Shirley Jackson
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this was a time and a land where enchantments were swiftly made and broken -- Shirley Jackson
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Fear and guilt are sisters; -- Shirley Jackson
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I think, for instance, that no one can really love a person who is not superior in every way. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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It has always been my opinion that princesses are confined in towers only because they choose to stay confined, and the only dragon required to keep them there was their own desire to be kept. -- Shirley Jackson
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Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, and Bess, they all went together to find a bird's nest ... -- Shirley Jackson
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For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time. -- Shirley Jackson
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The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable -- Shirley Jackson
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Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying, "Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor. -- Shirley Jackson
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I made a rule for myself: Never think anything more than once... -- Shirley Jackson
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A pretty sight, a lady with a book. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of. -- Shirley Jackson
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Am I walking toward something I should be running away from? -- Shirley Jackson
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I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this ... -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon. -- Shirley Jackson
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So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you. -- Shirley Jackson
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It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed. -- Shirley Jackson
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I assume then, that you have no real faith in the fondness any of the rest of us may feel for you?'
'None,' said Mrs. Halloran. -- Shirley Jackson
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I am a kind of stray cat, aren't I? -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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In delay there lies no plenty. -- Shirley Jackson
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Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky. -- Shirley Jackson
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The food comes from the ground and cant' be permitted to stay there and rot; something has to be done with it. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. -- Shirley Jackson
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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
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When shall we live if not now? -- Shirley Jackson
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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven. -- Shirley Jackson
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Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants dies within its walls. -- Shirley Jackson
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What was wrong with Mrs Blackwood doing her own cooking"
"Please" (...) "I personally preferred the arsenic". -- Shirley Jackson
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We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others; -- Shirley Jackson
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It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight. -- Shirley Jackson
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(an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch, -- Shirley Jackson
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It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make. -- Shirley Jackson
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I delight in what I fear. -- Shirley Jackson