Quotes from Shirley Jackson

Mary Katherine must never be punished. Must never be sent to bed without her dinner. Mary Katherine will never allow herself to do anything inviting punishment.

Nachdem ich nun weiß, wer von uns ich ist', sagte Luke, 'kann ich mich gleich noch näher vorstellen.

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....

Ich werde so lange im Haus herumlaufen, bis ich in zehn von neun Fällen den Ort finde, wo es was zu essen gibt.

It has always been my opinion, you know, 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.

what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me.

The wet raincoat smell was exciting, carrying with it remotely the institutional smells of the college, a faint echo of a cologne Natalie had never worn in her life; near the pocket was a cigarette burn she had not made; the raincoat was in itself a symbol of going and coming, of wishing and fearing, or, precisely, the going out of a warm, firelit house into the heartbreaking cold.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.

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;

Beneath the trees it was not dark as a room is dark when the lights are put out, the artificial darkness which comes when an artificial light is gone; it was the deep natural darkness which comes with a forsaking of natural light.

looking up and down the street, which managed, even in the sunlight, to be dark and ugly.

I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

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

Fear 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.

especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since

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; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.

Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.

Qué frío hace, pensó Eleanor infantilmente; nunca seré capaz de volver a dormir con todo este ruido surgiendo de mi cabeza; ¿cómo pueden los demás oír el ruido, si está saliendo de mi cabeza? Estoy desapareciendo centímetro a centímetro en esta casa, me estoy desmoronando cada vez un poco más porque todo este ruido me está desgajando; ¿por qué están asustados los demás?

She forced herself to sit up primly on the edge of the marble bench, repressing firmly the nausea she felt at its warm pressure, and she smoothed the black linen of her dress across her lap, and tucked in her hair, which had somehow come loose, and crossed her ankles decently, and took her black-edged handkerchief from her bosom and dried her eyes and wiped away the dampness and grime from her face. Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.

it is really unbelievably difficult to get accurate information about a haunted house;

It is my hope to, one day, share my love for HPL with the world.

On the other hand," the doctor continued behind her, "a Fielding novel comparable in length, although hardly in subject matter, would never do for very young children. I even have doubts about Sterne—

Eleanor, watching, thought wryly that it might sometimes be oppressive to be for long around one so immediately in tune, so perceptive, as Theodora.

go." "In effect, she did. I really think the poor girl was hated to death; she hanged herself, by the way. Gossip says she hanged herself