Shirley Jackson Quotes

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

He turned down the passageway to their little parlor, and sent the door swinging open with a crash. "Losing my temper will not help," he said, and gave the door a vicious kick. ~ Shirley Jackson

I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.'
'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance. ~ Shirley Jackson

She wants her cup of stars." Eleanor ~ Shirley Jackson

Jonas," I told him, "you are not to listen any more to Cousin Charles," and Jonas regarded me in wide-eyed astonishment, that I should attempt to make decisions for him. ~ Shirley Jackson

The most important thing she had learned so far - and it was something to know, after only twelve hours - was that she need not pretend, always, to be competent or at home in a strange atmosphere. Other people, she had learned, were frequently uneasy and uncertain, lost their way or their money, were nervous at being approached by strangers or wary of officials. ~ Shirley Jackson

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame. ~ Shirley Jackson

She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. ~ Shirley Jackson

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

On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts. ~ Shirley Jackson

It is not possible, I frequently think, to walk down the street as fast as you can and kick yourself at the same time. ~ Shirley Jackson

Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me. ~ Shirley Jackson

Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and in her art (an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch," and ~ Shirley Jackson

It is a longing so intense that it creates what it desires, it cannot endure any touch of correction; it is, as I say, unspeakable. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

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

Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet. Theodora dreamed over the fire beyond the tips of her toes, and Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me. I have red shoes, she thought-that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons. I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and I am using it and I have a place in this room. I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here. 'I have red shoes,' she said very softly, and Theodora turned and smiled up at her. ~ Shirley Jackson

Brown, they would later write, had taught them that the goal of reading and criticizing was "to know and understand, not to like or dislike, and the aim of writing was to get down what you wanted to say, not to gesticulate or impress. ~ Ruth Franklin

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

(an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch, ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

Peace, Eleanor thought concretely; what I want in all this world is peace, a quiet spot to lie and think, a quiet spot up among the flowers where I can dream and tell myself sweet stories. ~ Shirley Jackson

Perhaps the village was really a great game board, with the squares neatly marked out, and I had been moved past the square which read 'Fire; return to Start,' and was now on the last few squares, with only one move to go to reach home. ~ Shirley Jackson

Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying, "Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

That's wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn't ever talk about whether people like you, that's bad taste. ~ Shirley Jackson

Betty Dravis is a fantastic mix of Shirley Jackson, Edna Buchanan and Janis Joplin. Don't ask me how I came up with that unlikely comparison––I just feel it, and I haven't been drinking much tonight. ~ Mark Laflamme

Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

And if it played its cards right they could end up flitting through the Overlook's halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but you wouldn't be alone in the Overlook, oh no, there would be plenty of company here. ~ Stephen King

On the main street of one village she passed a vast house, pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps, and she thought that perhaps she might live there, dusting the lions each morning and patting their heads good night. ~ Shirley Jackson

Each was so bent upon her own despair that escape into darkness was vital, and, containing themselves in that tight, vulnerable, impossible cloak which is fury, they stamped along together, each achingly aware of the other, each determined to be the last to speak. ~ Shirley Jackson

When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them. ~ Shirley Jackson

The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf. ~ Shirley Jackson

She wants her cup of stars. ~ Shirley Jackson

Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven. ~ Shirley Jackson

The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books, ~ Shirley Jackson

I think, for instance, that no one can really love a person who is not superior in every way. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this," and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened. There was no change coming, I thought here, only spring; I was wrong to be so frightened. The days would get warmer, and Uncle Julian would sit in the sun, and Constance would laugh when she worked in the garden, and it would always be the same. Jonas went on and on ("And then we sang! And then we sang!") and the leaves moved overhead and it would always be the same. ~ Shirley Jackson

In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don't think I like reality very much. Principally, I don't understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do. ~ Shirley Jackson

I have a beard,' Dr. Montague said, pleased, and looked around at them with a happy beam. 'My wife,' he told them, 'likes a man to wear a beard. Many women, on the other hand, find a beard distasteful. A clean-shaven man - you'll excuse me, my boy - never looks fully dressed, my wife tells me.' He held out his glass to Luke. ~ Shirley Jackson

I don't like the younger sister,' Theodora said. 'First she stole her sister's lover, and then she tried to steal her sister's dishes. ~ Shirley Jackson

She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words. ~ Shirley Jackson

Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children ... ~ Shirley Jackson

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. ~ Shirley Jackson

It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a 4-day vacation, the thin veneer of family wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities. ~ Shirley Jackson

Constance and Merricat are indeed "two halves of the same person," together forming one identity, just as a man and a woman are traditionally supposed to do in marriage. Not finding that wholeness in marriage, Jackson sought it elsewhere … Indeed, the novel, in its final version, is not about "two women murdering a man." It is about two women who metaphorically murder male society and its expectations for them by insisting on living separate from it, governed only by themselves. ~ Ruth Franklin

I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do. ~ Shirley Jackson

Mrs. Arnold," the doctor said, coming around the desk, "we're not going to help things any this way."
"What is going to help?" Mrs. Arnold said. "Is everyone really crazy but me?"
"Mrs. Arnold," the doctor said severely, "I want you to get hold of yourself. In a disoriented world like ours today, alienation from reality frequently--"
"Disoriented," Mrs. Arnold said. She stood up. "Alienation," she said. "Reality." Before the doctor could stop her she walked to the door and opened it. "Reality," she said, and went out. ~ Shirley Jackson

Sally at this time gave up any notion of being a co-operative member of a family, named herself "Tiger" and settled down to an unceasing, and seemingly endless, war against clothes, toothbrushes, all green vegetables, and bed. ~ Shirley Jackson

Remember the metallic sound and taste of all of it. And the outrage. ~ Shirley Jackson

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer - any writer, beginning or otherwise - is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or - kindest of all - goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind. ~ Shirley Jackson

What was wrong with Mrs Blackwood doing her own cooking"
"Please" (...) "I personally preferred the arsenic". ~ Shirley Jackson

Can't you make them stop?' I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love. ~ Shirley Jackson

When shall we live if not now? ~ Shirley Jackson

Anything you raise by the way of spirits you have to put back yourself. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried," she said, "was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all. ~ Shirley Jackson

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

I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman's page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me. ~ Shirley Jackson

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

It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight. ~ Shirley Jackson

I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died.I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet. ~ Shirley Jackson

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

THE THREE is really wonderful. A mix of Michael Crichton and Shirley Jackson, hard to put down and vastly entertaining. ~ Stephen King

I clear breakfast at ten o'clock. I set on lunch at one. Dinner I set on at six. It's ten o'clock. ~ Shirley Jackson

It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before father's death on a cold wet day. ~ Shirley Jackson

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. ~ Shirley Jackson

Eliminating Charles from everything he had touched was almost impossible, but it seemed to me that if I altered our father's room, and perhaps later the kitchen and the drawing room and the study, and even finally the garden, Charles would be lost, shut off from what he recognized, and would have to concede that this was not the house he had come to visit and so would go away. ~ Shirley Jackson

I played a game when I did the shopping. I thought about the children's games where the board is marked into little spaces and each player moves according to a throw of the dice; there were always dangers, like "lose one turn" and "go back four spaces" and "return to start," and little helps, like "advance three spaces" and "take an extra turn." The library was my start and the black rock was my goal. I had to move down one side of Main Street, cross, and then move up the other side until I reached the black rock, when I would win. ~ Shirley Jackson

Perhaps - and this was her most persistent thought, the thought that stayed with her and came suddenly to trouble her at odd moments, and to comfort her - suppose, actually, she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite, a creature of deep lovely destiny; suppose she were someone else? ~ Shirley Jackson

Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar. ~ Shirley Jackson

Looking up as she did immediately, she saw immeasurable space, traveling past the locked hands of the trees, past the large nodding implacable heads, up and into the silence of the sky, where the stars remained, indifferent. ~ Shirley Jackson

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 ~ Shirley Jackson

Yes," he said. "I never had a mother, as I told you. Now I find that everyone else has had something that I missed." He smiled at her. "I am entirely selfish," he said ruefully, "and always hoping that someone will tell me to behave, someone will make herself responsible for me and make me be grown-up."
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. "Why don't you grow up by yourself?" she asked him, and wondered how many people - how many women - had already asked him that. ~ Shirley Jackson

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from? ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable, ~ A.M. Homes

The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything's being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.

Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into he black box. Th ~ Shirley Jackson

Morgan had been, for a very long time, the most remarkable object in her own landscape, and anything stranger than herself was, to her mind, either an obvious sham, or non-existent. ~ Shirley Jackson

Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals. ~ Shirley Jackson

I assume then, that you have no real faith in the fondness any of the rest of us may feel for you?'
'None,' said Mrs. Halloran. ~ Shirley Jackson

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

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings. ~ Shirley Jackson

Tod Donald rarely did anything voluntarily, or with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself; he found himself doing one thing, and then he found himself doing another, and that, as he saw it, was the way one lived along, never deciding, never helping. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

Bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine. ~ Shirley Jackson

An Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends. ~ Shirley Jackson

Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations--visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment. ~ Shirley Jackson

All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women. ~ Shirley Jackson

Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants dies within its walls. ~ Shirley Jackson

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. ~ Shirley Jackson

A thought of the world swept over her, of people living around her, singing, dancing, laughing; it seemed unexpectedly and joyfully that in all this great world of the city there were a thousand places where she might go and live in deep happiness, among friends who were waiting for her here in the stirring crowds of the city. ~ Shirley Jackson

Fear and guilt are sisters; ~ Shirley Jackson