Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings.”

— Shirley Jackson

103. “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.”

— Shirley Jackson

104. “She wants her cup of stars.”

— Shirley Jackson

105. “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

106. “Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants die within its walls.”

— Shirley Jackson

107. “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. 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

108. “Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying, “Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor.”

— Shirley Jackson

109. “She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method – imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.”

— Shirley Jackson

110. “What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”

— Shirley Jackson

111. “The twins were loitering over their cereal, and Mrs. Walpole, with one eye on the clock and the other on the kitchen window past which the school bus would come in a matter of minutes, felt the unreasonable irritation that comes with being late on a school morning, the wading-through-molasses feeling of trying to hurry children.”

— Shirley Jackson

112. “In the country of the story the writer is king.”

— Shirley Jackson

113. “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

114. “It really is an instinct, the knack of dealing with irrational people, Natalie was thinking; I suppose any mind like mine, which is so close, actually, to the irrational and so tempted by it, is able easily to pass the dividing line between rational and irrational and communicate with someone drunk, or insane, or asleep.”

— Shirley Jackson

115. “I dined upon a bird, and radishes from the garden, and homemade plum jam.”

— Shirley Jackson

116. “It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope.”

— Shirley Jackson

117. “I am caught in a kind of wonder, I am still with joy.”

— Shirley Jackson

118. “They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed.”

— Shirley Jackson

119. “When I am afraid, I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful not-afraid side of the world, I can see chairs and tables and windows staying the same, not affected in the least, and I can see things like the careful woven texture of the carpet, not even moving. But when I am afraid I no longer exist in any relation to these things. I suppose because things are not afraid.”

— Shirley Jackson

120. “Outside were the eucalyptus trees, like lace against the sky. If it were only possible to lie against them, light and bodiless, sink into their softness, deeper and deeper, lost in them, buried, never come back again...”

— Shirley Jackson

121. “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

122. “We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place – we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else.”

— Shirley Jackson

123. “I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie.”

— Shirley Jackson

124. “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

125. “Therefore it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food.”

— Shirley Jackson

126. “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

127. “I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.”

— Shirley Jackson

128. “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”

— Shirley Jackson

129. “I don’t like the younger sister,” Theodora said. “First she stole her sister’s lover, and then she tried to steal her sister’s dishes. No, I don’t like her.”

— Shirley Jackson

130. “Around the house, my head deep in a pillowcase or the oven, my eyes focused on that supernatural neatness which the housewife sees somehow shadowing her familiar furniture, it was largely possible to disregard, or not-quite-hear, Sally, but in the car I was entirely what I believe is called a captive audience.”

— Shirley Jackson

131. “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

132. “I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.”

— Shirley Jackson

133. “It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.”

— Shirley Jackson

134. “A thought of the world swept over her, of people living around her, singing, dancing, laughing; it seemed unexpectedly and joyfully that in all this great world of the city there were a thousand places where she might go and live in deep happiness, among friends who were waiting for her here in the stirring crowds of the city.”

— Shirley Jackson

135. “In the darkness their feet felt that they were going downhill, and each privately and perversely accused the other of taking, deliberately, a path they had followed together once before in happiness.”

— Shirley Jackson

136. “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

137. “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

138. “It is a longing so intense that it creates what it desires, it cannot endure any touch of correction; it is, as I say, unspeakable.”

— Shirley Jackson

139. “I disliked having a fork pointed at me and I disliked the sound of the voice never stopping; I wished he would put food on the fork and put it into his mouth and strangle himself.”

— Shirley Jackson

140. “This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope.”

— Shirley Jackson

141. “Remember, Natalie, your enemies will always come from the same place your friends do.”

— Shirley Jackson

142. “The idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely.”

— Shirley Jackson

143. “When I was a child,” Theodora said lazily, “‘ – many years ago,’ Doctor, as you put it so tactfully – I was whipped for throwing a brick through a greenhouse roof. I remember I thought about if for a long time, remembering the whipping but remembering also the lovely crash, and after thinking about it very seriously I went out and did it again.”

— Shirley Jackson

144. “The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.”

— Shirley Jackson

145. “Let 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; it is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.”

— Shirley Jackson

146. “Tell me something that only I will ever know, was perhaps what she wanted to ask him, or, What will you remember me by? – or even, Nothing of the least importance has ever belonged to me; can you help?”

— Shirley Jackson

147. “Anything you raise by the way of spirits you have to put back yourself.”

— Shirley Jackson

148. “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

149. “Someday,” she said evilly, rubbing her hands against her eyes, “I am going to get my eyes open all the time and then I will eat you and Lizzie both.”

— Shirley Jackson

150. “I reveal myself, then, at last: I am a villian, for I created wantonly, and a blackguard, for I destroyed without compassion; I have no excuse.”

— Shirley Jackson