Shirley Jackson Quotes

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.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

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.

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.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

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.

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.

I delight in what I fear.

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.

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.

Wear your boots if you wander today

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

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.

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

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.

Bridge is a game for the undivided intellect.

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.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

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.

I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.

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.

in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.

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

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

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

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

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.

I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.

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.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...

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

I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.

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

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.

The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.

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

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.

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

Oh Constance, we are so happy.

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.

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.

It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.

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.

I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.' 'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.

God! Whose hand was I holding?

For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.

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?

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.