Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Shirley Jackson

2. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

— Shirley Jackson

3. “I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.”

— Shirley Jackson

4. “So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.”

— Shirley Jackson

5. “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.”

— Shirley Jackson

6. “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

7. “Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?”

— Shirley Jackson

8. “Do you always go where you’re not wanted?” Eleanor smiled placidly. “I’ve never been wanted anywhere,” she said.”

— Shirley Jackson

9. “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.”

— Shirley Jackson

10. “Fear and guilt are sisters;.”

— Shirley Jackson

11. “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

12. “The thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of.”

— Shirley Jackson

13. “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.”

— Shirley Jackson

14. “God! Whose hand was I holding?”

— Shirley Jackson

15. “I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend that I am a trim little housewife... I live in a dank old place with a ghost.”

— Shirley Jackson

16. “Sometimes the people who knock you down never turn once to look.”

— Shirley Jackson

17. “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

18. “She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words.”

— Shirley Jackson

19. “The journey itself was her positive action, her destination vague, unimagined, perhaps nonexistent.”

— Shirley Jackson

20. “A person angry, or laughing, or terrified, or jealous, will go stubbornly on into extremes of behavior impossible at another time;.”

— Shirley Jackson

21. “A clean house is a sign of mental inferiority.”

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

24. “I’m going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”

— Shirley Jackson

25. “On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”

— Shirley Jackson

26. “Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.”

— Shirley Jackson

27. “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

28. “I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.”

— Shirley Jackson

29. “It’s not the way it used to be... people ain’t the way they used to be.”

— Shirley Jackson

30. “I am home, she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.”

— Shirley Jackson

31. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

— Shirley Jackson

32. “Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine.”

— Shirley Jackson

33. “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

34. “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 a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

— Shirley Jackson

35. “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”

— Shirley Jackson

36. “Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.”

— Shirley Jackson

37. “Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.”

— Shirley Jackson

38. “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

39. “In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.”

— Shirley Jackson

40. “Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.”

— Shirley Jackson

41. “I delight in what I fear.”

— Shirley Jackson

42. “Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.”

— Shirley Jackson

43. “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

44. “The least Charles could have done,′ Constance said, considering seriously, ’was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.”

— Shirley Jackson

45. “It’s not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.”

— Shirley Jackson

46. “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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

47. “She was a stranger in a world of strangers and they were strangers she had left behind.”

— Shirley Jackson

48. “It’s all my fault, anyway.” That was her new way of thinking.”

— Shirley Jackson

49. “Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else.”

— Shirley Jackson

50. “Wait till you see the bedrooms,” Eleanor said. “Mine used to be the embalming room, I think.” “It’s the home I’ve always dreamed of,” Theodora said. “A little hideaway where I can be alone with my thoughts. Particularly if my thoughts happened to be about murder or suicide or –.”

— Shirley Jackson