Quotes from Shirley Jackson

This damn place, Natalie said, 2it always turns out not to have the things I want, after all. I get up inside and i knock over an ashtray and everyone looks at me and here I come rushing outdoors because I think it´s where I want to be, and then when I get out here it turns out to be the same old place I passed coming in Thats because you came out the same door, suggested Tony.

Try to remember with description that you must never just let it lie there; nothing in your story should ever be static unless you have a very good reason indeed for keeping your reader still; the essence of the story is motion.

The minute the light changes, she told herself firmly; there's no sense. The light changed before she was ready and in the minute before she collected herself traffic turning the corner overwhelmed her and she shrank back against the curb. She looked longingly at the cigar store on the opposite corner, with her apartment house beyond; she wondered, How do people ever manage to get there, and knew that by wondering, by admitting a doubt, she was lost.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. 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. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides , the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

No soporto escribir temas autobiográficos porque si son aburridos, nadie debería leerlos, y si son interesnates, debería usarlos en una historia.

How happy we all are, she thought, and how lucky that I came at last!

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.

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.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. 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. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.

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

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

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

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

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.

To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.

Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.

I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

I delight in what I fear.

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

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