Shirley Jackson Quotes

61 quotes in 1028 categories

• I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains…
• 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…
• February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.
• I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.
• Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
• 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…
• I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with…
• Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker … [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of…
• The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
• It was one of those winter days that suddenly dream of spring, when the sky is blue and soft and clear, and the wind has…
• 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…
• I delight in what I fear.
• 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…
• Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
• 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…
• No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
• We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
• 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…
• 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.…
• We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in…

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