Shirley Jackson Quotes (41 Quotes)

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.

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.

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?

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.

God! Whose hand was I holding?

I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.

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.

I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.

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.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. 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. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.

Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.

Oh Constance, we are so happy.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny movements inside.

On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.

My dear, how can I make you perceive that there is no danger where there is nothing but love and understanding?

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.

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.

Wear your boots if you wander today

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.

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?

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

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.

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.

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.

Let 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 . . .

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.

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

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.

Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah and Carry.

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.

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.

I delight in what I fear.

February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.

It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.

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.