Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.”

— Shirley Jackson

52. “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

53. “Oh Constance, we are so happy.”

— Shirley Jackson

54. “A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”

— Shirley Jackson

55. “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

56. “We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.”

— Shirley Jackson

57. “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

58. “The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.”

— Shirley Jackson

59. “Look. There’s only one of me, and it’s all I’ve got. I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I’m living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can’t stop it, but I know I’m not really going to be hurt and yet time is so long and even a second goes on and on and I could stand any of it if I could only surrender-.”

— Shirley Jackson

60. “Peace, Eleanor thought concretely; what I want in all this world is peace, a quiet spot to lie and think, a quiet spot up among the flowers where I can dream and tell myself sweet stories.”

— Shirley Jackson

61. “I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.”

— Shirley Jackson

62. “Hill House, she thought, You’re as hard to get into as heaven.”

— Shirley Jackson

63. “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

64. “I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come. I wrote the first word – melody – in the apricot jam on my toast with the handle of a spoon and then put the toast in my mouth and ate it very quickly. I was one-third safe.”

— Shirley Jackson

65. “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

66. “Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life.”

— Shirley Jackson

67. “Wear your boots if you wander today.”

— Shirley Jackson

68. “She turned her car onto the last stretch of straight drive leading her directly, face to face, to Hill House and, moving without thought, pressed her foot on the brake to stall the car and sat, staring. The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.”

— Shirley Jackson

69. “All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.”

— Shirley Jackson

70. “All I want is to be cherished, she thought, and here I am talking gibberish with a selfish man.”

— Shirley Jackson

71. “On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.”

— Shirley Jackson

72. “Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”

— Shirley Jackson

73. “Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.”

— Shirley Jackson

74. “The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf.”

— Shirley Jackson

75. “I am a kind of stray cat, aren’t I?”

— Shirley Jackson

76. “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

77. “If I am spared,” he always said to Constance, “I will write the book myself. If not, see that my notes are entrusted to some worthy cynic who will not be too concerned with the truth.”

— Shirley Jackson

78. “Don’t be so afraid all the time,” she said and reached out to touch Eleanor’s cheek with one finger. “We never know where our courage is coming from.”

— Shirley Jackson

79. “I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come.”

— Shirley Jackson

80. “On the main street of one village she passed a vast house, pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps, and she thought that perhaps she might live there, dusting the lions each morning and patting their heads good night.”

— Shirley Jackson

81. “Everything is worse... if you think something is looking at you.”

— Shirley Jackson

82. “We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others; I had made a monster and turned it loose upon the world and – since recognition is, after all, the cruelest pain – had seen it clearly and with understanding.”

— Shirley Jackson

83. “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

84. “Nothing,” she said, “upsets me more than being hungry; I snarl and snap and burst into tears.”

— Shirley Jackson

85. “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”

— Shirley Jackson

86. “Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.”

— Shirley Jackson

87. “The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain,” said Lord Byron, enunciating a basic Romantic idea and, perhaps, hoping that goblins, ghosts, and demons provided some necessary release.”

— Shirley Jackson

88. “Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister’s shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society.”

— Shirley Jackson

89. “Jonas,” I told him, “you are not to listen any more to Cousin Charles,” and Jonas regarded me in wide-eyed astonishment, that I should attempt to make decisions for him.”

— Shirley Jackson

90. “Bridge is a game for the undivided intellect.”

— Shirley Jackson

91. “People,” the doctor said sadly, “are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.”

— Shirley Jackson

92. “I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.”

— Shirley Jackson

93. “I live a mad, abandoned life, draped in a shawl and going from garret to garret.”

— Shirley Jackson

94. “I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.”

— Shirley Jackson

95. “No, she thought, you are not going to catch me so cheaply; I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings; this man is a parrot. I will tell him that I can never understand such a thing, that maudlin self-pity does not move directly at my heart; I will not make a fool of myself by encouraging him to mock me. “I understand, yes,” she said.”

— Shirley Jackson

96. “We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.”

— Shirley Jackson

97. “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

98. “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

99. “An Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends.”

— Shirley Jackson

100. “I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.”

— Shirley Jackson