Quotes from Shirley Jackson

The thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of.

In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.

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.

Not one of us, even after last night, can say the word ghost without a little involuntary smile. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

In the night, in the dark.

Miss Fielding had no fears of ultimate survival, even in beauty. When she passed on, she would draw after her every trailing mist of herself, effacing herself so completely that even after her death, even after her bones, which she could not help, were gone, she would be a bother to no one, would intrude on no mind.

It was probable that everyone on Pepper Street knew that Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were, oddly, friends, but it is certain that no one was particularly interested in it. Both Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were so exactly the sort of people who want to hide, that the neighborhood was only thankful to have them hiding together, instead of intruding their modesty on busier people.

My ambitions for you are slowly being realised, and, even though you are unhappy, console yourself with the thought that it was part of my plan for you to be unhappy for a while. The fact that you associate intimately with girls who do not care for the things you do should strengthen your own artistic integrity and fortify you against the world; remember, Natalie, your enemies will always come from the same place your friends do.

The journey itself was her positive action, her destination vague, unimagined, perhaps nonexistent.

I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die." Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. "The way you did before?" she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. "Yes," I said after a minute, "the way I did before.

It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope.

Perhaps someday they would grow as dragons.

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. I wrote the first word—melody—in the apricot jam on my toast with the handle of a spoon and then put the toast in my mouth and ate it very quickly. I was one-third safe.

It is unholy because it is heretic. It is foul. It is abominable to need something so badly that you cannot picture living without it. It is a contradiction to the condition of mankind.

I am caught in a kind of wonder, I am still with joy.

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain," said Lord Byron, enunciating a basic Romantic idea and, perhaps, hoping that goblins, ghosts, and demons provided some necessary release

They saw me at once, and I thought of them rotting away and curling in pain and crying out loud; I wanted them doubled up and crying on the ground in front of me.

At that time, of course, Natalie reflected with contentment, her life would be done. There would be no further fears for Natalie, no possibility of walking wrong when you were no more than a skull in a strange man´s hands.

We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place—we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else.

Horror is made of such base material—so easily rejected or dismissed—that it may be hard to accept my postulate that within the genre lies one of the last refuges of spirituality in this, our materialistic world. But it is a fact that, through the ages, most storytellers have had to resort to the fantastic in order to elevate their discourse to the level of parable.

say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

Her manner of dress, of speech, of doing her hair, of spending her time, had not changed since it first became apparent to a far younger Morgen that in all her life to come no one was, in all probability, going to care in the slightest how she looked, or what she did, and the minor wrench of leaving humanity behind was more than compensated for by her complacent freedom from a thousand small irritations.

There's only one of me, and it's all I've got.

Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.