Shirley Jackson Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.

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

Shirley Jackson
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

Shirley Jackson
In all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.

Shirley Jackson
It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.

Shirley Jackson
Mrs. Willow was absolutely determined to be affable and would not be denied.

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

Shirley Jackson
I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.

Shirley Jackson
"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

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

Shirley Jackson
Cocoa? Cocoa! Damn miserable puny stuff, fit for kittens and unwashed boys. Did Shakespeare drink cocoa?

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

Shirley Jackson
February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.

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

Shirley Jackson
There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.

Shirley Jackson
All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.

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
"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said.
"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."

Shirley Jackson
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.

Shirley Jackson
I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

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
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
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