Quotes from Shirley Jackson

Forgiveness is warm Like a tear on a cheek!

In any case," the doctor said, "I will not sleep for an hour or so yet; 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.

Is everyone really crazy but me?

Marble is always a shock," she said. "It never feels like you think it's going to. I suppose a lifesize statue looks enough like a real person to make you expect to feel skin.

There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery  open. There were the lists to make up­­ of heads of families, heads of households in each family, members of each household in each family.

By the time she was standing up and in her bathrobe the day had fallen into its routine; after the first involuntary rebellion against every day's alarm she subsided regularly into the shower, make-up, dress, breakfast schedule which would take her through the beginning of the day and out into the morning where she could forget the green grass and the hot sun and begin to look forward to dinner and the evening.

the false glorious promises of spring were everywhere, showing oddly through the village grime.

Everything is worse," he said, looking at Eleanor, "if you think something is looking at you.

He turned down the passageway to their little parlor, and sent the door swinging open with a crash. Losing my temper will not help, he said, and gave the door a vicious kick.

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 was almost halfway past the fence.

You keep thinking of the little children," Eleanor said to Theodora, "but I can't forget that lonely little companion

We never know where our courage is coming from.

Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly.

I remember coming home from school with friends who were startled at the percussive sound of my parents' typewriters both going at once, pounding away in different rooms.

No 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 House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. 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.

The reassuring bulk of the college buildings showed ahead of her, and she looked fondly up at them and smiled. As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.

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. Why don't you grow up by yourself? she asked him, and wondered how many people—how many women—had already asked him that.

Nothing, she said, upsets me more than being hungry; I snarl and snap and burst into tears.

When I am afraid, I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful not-afraid side of the world, I can see chairs and tables and windows staying the same, not affected in the least, and I can see things like the careful woven texture of the carpet, not even moving. But when I am afraid I no longer exist in any relation to these things. I suppose because things are not afraid.

Because this was a time and a land where enchantments were swiftly made and broken she wanted to linger over her lunch, knowing that Hill House always waited for her at the end of her day.

I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.

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.

Stuff yourself full of kippers, Luke said. Then it will be impossible to feel anything at all.

No one ever remembers just a bad thing, they remember all around it, all that happened before it and after it, and of course, she told herself consolingly, one bad thing is probably enough.