Shirley Jackson Quotes

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.

~ Shirley Jackson

In the country of the story the writer is king.

~ 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

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?

~ Shirley Jackson

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

~ Shirley Jackson

Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.

~ Shirley Jackson

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

~ Shirley Jackson

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother's delusions. Now, I don't know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother's delusions, and they're solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do---and watch this carefully please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.

~ Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

~ Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, but some, to dream.

~ 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

Poor things, she thought - do they have to spend all this energy just to surround me? It seemed pitiful that these automatons should be created and wasted, never knowing more than a minor fragment of the pattern in which they were involved, to learn and follow through insensitively a tiny step in the great dance which was seen close up as the destruction of Natalie, and far off, as the end of the

~ Shirley Jackson

Around the house, my head deep in a pillowcase or the oven, my eyes focused on that supernatural neatness which the housewife sees somehow shadowing her familiar furniture, it was largely possible to disregard, or not-quite-hear, Sally, but in the car I was entirely what I believe is called a captive audience.

~ 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

Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly. The educational institution is certainly no exception to this, although training the young is by implication an art for old people exclusively, and novelty in education is allied to mutiny. Moreover, the mere process of learning is allied to mutiny. Moreover, the mere process of learning is so excruciating and so bewildering that no conceivable phraseology or combination of philosophies can make it practical as a method of marking time during what might be called the formative years.

~ Shirley Jackson

People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.(The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith - Version 1)

~ Shirley Jackson

I was thinking that being a demon and a ghost must be very difficult, even for Charles; if he ever forgot, or let his disguise drop for a minute, he would be recognized at once and driven away; he must be extremely careful to use the same voice every time, and present the same face and the same manner without a slip; he must be constantly on guard against betraying himself. I wondered if he would turn back to his true self when he was dead.

~ Shirley Jackson

...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

~ Shirley Jackson

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.

~ Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. 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

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

~ Shirley Jackson

...Don't be surprised, and I say it darkly, do not be surprised if you lose your Luke in this cause; perhaps Mrs. Dudley has not yet had her own mid morning snack, and she is perfectly capable of a filet de Luke á la meuniére, or perhaps dieppoise, depending upon her mood; if I do not return -and he shook his finger warningly under the doctor's nose- I entreat you to regard your lunch with the gravest suspicion. Bowing extravagantly, as befitted one off to slay a giant, he closed the door behind him.

~ Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. 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

Everything is worse...if you think something is looking at you.

~ Shirley Jackson

It’s not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.

~ Shirley Jackson

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

~ Shirley Jackson

My dear, how can I make you perceive that there is no danger where there is nothing but love and understanding?

~ Shirley Jackson

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

~ Shirley Jackson

He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition. He even hated the round table and the succession of tablecloths, one pale blue with yellow leaves, one white with red and orange squares. He hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.

~ Shirley Jackson

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

~ Shirley Jackson

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.

~ Shirley Jackson

All cat stories start with the statement: 'My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,' and I lay with Jonas listening to his stories.

~ 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

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

~ Shirley Jackson

We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.

~ Shirley Jackson

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.

~ Shirley Jackson

She wants her cup of stars.

~ Shirley Jackson

On either side of Natalie as she walked toward her own room were doors: perhaps behind one door a girl was studying, behind another a girl was crying, behind a third a girl was turning uneasily in her sleep. Behind a certain definite door downstairs Anne and Vicki sat, laughing and speaking in loud voices whatever they chose to say; behind other doors girls lifted their heads at Natalie's footsteps, turned, wondered, and went back to their work. I wish I were the only person in all the world, Natalie thought, with a poignant longing, thinking then that perhaps she was, after all.

~ Shirley Jackson

When Jim Donell thought of something to 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.

~ Shirley Jackson

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