Shirley Jackson quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Shirley Jackson

Top Shirley Jackson Quotes

Browse top 85 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Shirley Jackson.

Favorite Shirley Jackson Quotes

1. "Oh Constance, we are so happy." ~ Shirley Jackson

2. "Wear your boots if you wander today" ~ Shirley Jackson

3. "Our house is old, and noisy, and full. when we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks." ~ Shirley Jackson

4. "Sister's gone to school," I said to Sally."Ah," said Sally. "And will she come home again?" ~ Shirley Jackson

5. "Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, 'I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,' and when Brad said, 'What starts to happen?' she said hysterically, 'People starting to come apart." ~ Shirley Jackson

6. "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

7. "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." ~ Shirley Jackson

8. "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

9. "I have a beard,' Dr. Montague said, pleased, and looked around at them with a happy beam. 'My wife,' he told them, 'likes a man to wear a beard. Many women, on the other hand, find a beard distasteful. A clean-shaven man - you'll excuse me, my boy - never looks fully dressed, my wife tells me.' He held out his glass to Luke." ~ Shirley Jackson

10. "I clear breakfast at ten o'clock. I set on lunch at one. Dinner I set on at six. It's ten o'clock." ~ Shirley Jackson

11. "Say Morg--you mind if I use the rest of your bath salts? There's only a little left." ~ Shirley Jackson

12. "And we held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky.'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.''I told you that you would like it on the moon." ~ Shirley Jackson

13. "I was already doing a lot of splendid research reading all the books about ghosts I could get hold of, and particularly true ghost stories - so much so that it became necessary for me to read a chapter of _Little Women_ every night before I turned out the light - and at the same time I was collecting pictures of houses, particularly odd houses, to see what I could find to make into a suitable haunted house." ~ Shirley Jackson

14. "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

15. "It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before father's death on a cold wet day." ~ Shirley Jackson

16. "Perhaps someone had once hoped to lighten the air of the blue room in Hill House with a dainty wallpaper, not seeing how such a hope would evaporate in Hill House, leaving only the faintest hint of its existence, like an almost inaudible echo of sobbing far away..." ~ Shirley Jackson

17. "We believed optimistically that Laurie was a reformed character. I told my husband, on the last day of Laurie's confinement, that actually one good scare like that could probably mark a child for life, and my husband pointed out that kids frequently have an instinctive desire to follow the good example rather than the bad, once they find out which is which. We agreed that a good moral background and thorough grounding in the Hardy Boys would always tell in the long run.("Arch-Criminal")" ~ Shirley Jackson

18. "Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them, each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question-as "Do you love me?" -could never be answered or forgotten. They walked slowly, meditating, wondering, and the path sloped down from their feet and they followed, walking side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation; their feinting and hesitation done with, they could only await passively for resolution. Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other. They perceived at the same moment the change in the path and each knew then the other's knowledge of it; Theodora took Eleanor's arm and, afraid to stop, they moved on slowly, close together, and ahead of them the path widened and blackened and curved." ~ Shirley Jackson

19. "In the country of the story the writer is king." ~ Shirley Jackson

20. "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

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

22. "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

23. "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 the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved." ~ Shirley Jackson

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

25. "I delight in what I fear." ~ Shirley Jackson

26. "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 give me a job. I have cleaned homes." ~ Shirley Jackson

27. "Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heart-breakingly mobile." ~ Shirley Jackson

28. "Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl." ~ Shirley Jackson

29. "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 taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman's page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me." ~ Shirley Jackson

30. "No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense." ~ Shirley Jackson

31. "God! Whose hand was I holding?" ~ Shirley Jackson

32. "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

33. "In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too." ~ Shirley Jackson

34. "I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died.I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet." ~ Shirley Jackson

35. "I took everybody, including the dog, for a ride, and we went around the block four or five times, congratulating one another upon our new mobility. I discovered that my former casual attitude of timid acquiescence was not consistent with someone who could drive a car, so I fell gradually into a new personality, swashbuckling and brazen, with a cigarette usually hanging out of one corner of my mouth because I had to keep both hands on the wheel." ~ Shirley Jackson

36. "Don't touch my papers," Uncle Julian said, trying to cover them with his hands. "You get away from my papers, you bastard.""What!?" said Charles."I apologize," Uncle Julian said to Constance. "Not language fitting for your ears, my dear. Just tell this young bastard to stay away from my papers." ~ Shirley Jackson

37. "Good morning, Jonas. You are a furred lead, I think." ~ Shirley Jackson

38. "Where did he go, your father?''Africa.''What for?''To shoot lions, of course.''What on Earth for?' said Mrs. Willow blankly.'Some people shoot lions,' the girl said pleasantly, 'and some people do not shoot lions. My father is one of the people who do." ~ Shirley Jackson

39. "Tod Donald rarely did anything voluntarily, or with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself; he found himself doing one thing, and then he found himself doing another, and that, as he saw it, was the way one lived along, never deciding, never helping." ~ Shirley Jackson

40. "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

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

42. "A pretty sight, a lady with a book." ~ Shirley Jackson

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

44. "I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin..." ~ Shirley Jackson

45. "Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar." ~ Shirley Jackson

46. "All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us." ~ Shirley Jackson

47. "I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons." ~ Shirley Jackson

48. "You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?" ~ Shirley Jackson

49. "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

50. "She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by." ~ Shirley Jackson

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If I said that I couldn't live without Tom, it wouldn't be true. Of course I can live without him. It's just that it isn't going to be much fun."
Author: Anna Maxted

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