“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”
— 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
“…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
“I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.”
— 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
“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
“…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
“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
“People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.(“The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith” – Version 1)”
— 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
— 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
“I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon.”
— Shirley Jackson
“Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.”
— Shirley Jackson
“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.”
— 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
“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
“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
“In the country of the story the writer is king.”
— Shirley Jackson
“So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.”
— Shirley Jackson
“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