Quotes from Shirley Jackson

Am I the public conscience? Expected always to say in cold words what the rest of them are too arrogant to recognise?

She also depicted the cruel jokes of fate and chance unfolding in an amoral universe. It's just that instead of doing it with men and guns, she chose to write about mad, lonely girls and big, sinister houses.

The twins were loitering over their cereal, and Mrs. Walpole, with one eye on the clock and the other on the kitchen window past which the school bus would come in a matter of minutes, felt the unreasonable irritation that comes with being late on a school morning, the wading-through-molasses feeling of trying to hurry children.

You know," Theodora said slowly, "up until the last minute—when I got to the gates, I guess—I never really thought there would be a Hill House. You don't go around expecting things like this to happen." "But some of us go around hoping," Eleanor said.

Do you think that woman really means to make us a soufflé? Here is certainly a soufflé dish, and eggs and cheese—

Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question—as 'Do you love me?'—could never be answered or forgotten.

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.

skeptics, believers, and good croquet players are harder to come by today . . .

Mrs. Dudley," the doctor said, putting down his fork, "an admirable soufflé.

I have no way of knowing what we may be called upon to do for ourselves.

They walked over to it and Brad bent down gingerly: It's a leg all right, he said.

She is hysterical," said Mrs. Halloran. "Slap her quite firmly in the face.

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.

None of these things bothered us excessively; we have always been a family that carries bewilderment like a banner, and odd new confusions do not actually seem to be any more bewildering than the ones we invent for ourselves; moreover, in each of these cases it was easier to believe that nothing had happened, or that it was of no importance anyway.

In delay there lies no plenty, present mirth hath present laughter.

God has given me blood to drink.

Why do women always look so funny alone at night? she thought. I guess you're so used to seeing them with some one.

Only human beings and rabid animals turn on their own kind; gratuitous pain is unknown in nature.

Use all the tools at your disposal. The language is infinitely flexible, and your use of it should be completely deliberate. Never forget the grotesque effect of the absolutely wrong words.

The four of them stood, for the first time, in the wide, dark entrance hall of Hill House. Around them the house steadied and located them, above them the hills slept watchfully, small eddies of air and sound and movement stirred and waited and whispered, and the center of consciousness was somehow the small space where they stood, four separated people, and looked trustingly at one another.

how can i be nothing at all for hours and days at a time, and then suddenly create myself into a real person for ten minutes at bedtime?

We bought the big white house, at last, by merely signing our names on a piece of paper. Mr. Gore and Mr. Andrews down at the bank arranged the financial transference with an almost invisible maneuver of figures on a card. When my husband asked if we could borrow our money right back again and use the house as security, everybody laughed.

It was not possible to communicate with her because she would not abandon her coffee cup.

Now I want to say something about words artificially weighted; you can, and frequently must, make a word carry several meanings or messages in your story if you use the word right. This is a kind of shorthand.