Quotes from Shirley Jackson

And we held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky. 'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.' 'I told you that you would like it on the moon.

Wear your boots if you wander today

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.

Tell me something that only I will ever know, was perhaps what she wanted to ask him, or, What will you remember me by? - or even, Nothing of the least importance has ever belonged to me; can you help?

I am a kind of stray cat, aren't I?

The least Charles could have done,' Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.

Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.

I am home, she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group

I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.

Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life.

It was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant.

Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.

I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie.

I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come.

The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward--that's why they've been give bodies, to hide their souls.

She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method - imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.

I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.

Our house is old, and noisy, and full. when we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.

People," the doctor said sadly, "are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.

She wants her cup of stars.

I disliked having a fork pointed at me and I disliked the sound of the voice never stopping; I wished he would put food on the fork and put it into his mouth and strangle himself.

Sister's gone to school, I said to Sally. Ah, said Sally. And will she come home again?