Quotes from Shirley Jackson

I dread that it may be only a longing for annihilation. No person who has seen his own face plain can want to live longer.

Maybe you'll get onto the other side of that mirror in the new clean world. Maybe you'll look through from the other side and see this world again and go around crying that you wish some big thing would happen and wipe out that one and send you back here. Like I keep trying to tell you, it doesn't matter which world you're in.

If I am not the legal resident of the apartment you cannot evict me. You cannot evict Mrs. Tuttle, who is the legal resident of the apartment, because she is not living here. Unless you accept my check you are not going to receive any rent for the apartment at all because you cannot rent it to anyone else while I am living here because you cannot evict me so they could move in. Mrs. Tuttle will not pay the rent because she is not living here. Sincerely, Marian Griswold

Eleanor thought, I am the fourth person in this room; I am one' of them; I belong.

She should not have been doing the cooking! said Mrs. Wright strongly. Well of course there is the root of our trouble. Certainly she should not have been doing the cooking if her intention was to destroy all of us with poison. We would have been blindly unselfish to encourage her to cook under such circumstances.

When Mrs. Ferrier stepped inside our front door at one minute before three that afternoon it was perfectly clear to me without hesitation that we were not going to become fast friends.

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

By changing the emphasis and angle on this little plot we can make it say almost anything we like. There is certainly no need to worry about whether any of this is true, or actually happened; it is as true as you make it. The important thing is that it be true in the story, and actually happen there.

felt steamy and sticky and chilled through, and home seemed so far away that perhaps it did not exist at all.

what a shame that dreams are not the stuff that stories are made on.

She had done so much to preserve herself from this kind of captivity and had taken inevitably one of the many roads which would lead her to the same torment; she was helpless among people who hated her and showed it by holding her motionless until they should choose to release her.

It was one of those spring mornings in March; the sky between the buildings was bright and blue and the city air, warmed by motors and a million breaths, had a freshness and a sense of excitement that can come only from a breeze starting somewhere in the country, far away, and moving into the city while everyone is asleep, to freshen the air for morning.

I'll tell them,' she said, and the baby looked at me cynically.

Remember, this--this is the end we have waited for so long.

I have decided to ask you to please go away." "All right," he said. "You asked me." "Please will you go away?" "No," he said. I could not think of anything further to say.

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 . . .

All the millions of things we possessed as a family were inside the house, but, inexorably, there came one shocking moment when we discovered that the house was full.

Some lives, ending as Miss Fielding's would, leave a grain of memory, like a grain of sand, in the depths of another mind, a grain of sand which is like the constant irritation under an oyster's shell, eventually to grow with coating after coating of disguising beauty into a pearl. Sometime this memory would be pried loose, in its rounded beauty, to stand by itself as an object of delight.

Well, she asked, how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house? It's perfectly fine, Luke said, perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.

It is really an instinct, the knack of dealing with irrational people, Natalie was thinking; I suppose that any mind like mine, which is so close, actually, to the irrational and so tempted by it, is able easily to pass the dividing line between rational and irrational and communicate with someone drunk, or insane, or asleep.

Me imagino que el pueblo estaba lleno de corazones podridos que codiciaban nuestras pilas de monedas de oro, pero eran cobardes y temían a los Blackwood.

She was watching Aunt Morgen carefully, looking at the big earnest ugly face and the false little smile and the mouth still a little open, and she thought, people shouldn't ever look closely at one another, they're not like pictures.

Un giorno» ribatté con voce maligna, sfregandosi gli occhi con le dita «riuscirò a stare con gli occhi aperti tutto il tempo e vi mangerò tutti e due, te e Lizzie»

It is most agreeable to be a writer of fiction for several reasons–one of the most important being, of course that you can persuade people that it is really work if you look haggard enough–but perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words.