Shirley Jackson Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Shirley Jackson quote about:
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“I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.”
-- 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 -
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“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 story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.”
-- 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 -
“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 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 -
“She walked quickly around her one-room apartment. After more than four years in this one home she knew all its possibilities, how it could put on a sham appearance of warmth and welcome when she needed a place to hide in, how it stood over her in the night when she woke suddenly, how it could relax itself into a disagreeable unmade, badly-put-together state, mornings like this, anxious to drive her out and go back to sleep.”
-- 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 -
“It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“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 dropped its voice and whispers instead of screaming, and the sun is out and the trees look surprised, and over everything there is the faintest, palest tint of green.”
-- Shirley Jackson -
“It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”
-- 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 -
“I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes--the left--saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night. If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“Bridge is a game for the undivided intellect.”
-- Shirley Jackson
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