Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Sometimes, when it had been a hard day at school and the future looked unusually dark, Miss Matt would permit herself to cry luxuriously for half an hour; afterward she would wash her face, and dress and go out to some nice restaurant for dinner.”

— Shirley Jackson

152. “Looking up as she did immediately, she saw immeasurable space, traveling past the locked hands of the trees, past the large nodding implacable heads, up and into the silence of the sky, where the stars remained, indifferent.”

— Shirley Jackson

153. “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

154. “Each was so bent upon her own despair that escape into darkness was vital, and, containing themselves in that tight, vulnerable, impossible cloak which is fury, they stamped along together, each achingly aware of the other, each determined to be the last to speak.”

— Shirley Jackson

155. “By the time she was standing up and in her bathrobe the day had fallen into its routine; after the first involuntary rebellion against every day’s alarm she subsided regularly into the shower, make-up, dress, breakfast schedule which would take her through the beginning of the day and out into the morning where she could forget the green grass and the hot sun and begin to look forward to dinner and the evening.”

— Shirley Jackson

156. “I think, for instance, that no one can really love a person who is not superior in every way.”

— Shirley Jackson

157. “Miss Fielding had no fears of ultimate survival, even in beauty. When she passed on, she would draw after her every trailing mist of herself, effacing herself so completely that even after her death, even after her bones, which she could not help, were gone, she would be a bother to no one, would intrude on no mind.”

— Shirley Jackson

158. “Her manner of dress, of speech, of doing her hair, of spending her time, had not changed since it first became apparent to a far younger Morgen that in all her life to come no one was, in all probability, going to care in the slightest how she looked, or what she did, and the minor wrench of leaving humanity behind was more than compensated for by her complacent freedom from a thousand small irritations.”

— Shirley Jackson

159. “Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations – visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment.”

— Shirley Jackson

160. “Sally at this time gave up any notion of being a co-operative member of a family, named herself “Tiger” and settled down to an unceasing, and seemingly endless, war against clothes, toothbrushes, all green vegetables, and bed.”

— Shirley Jackson

161. “Say Morg – you mind if I use the rest of your bath salts? There’s only a little left.”

— Shirley Jackson

162. “I remember coming home from school with friends who were startled at the percussive sound of my parents’ typewriters both going at once, pounding away in different rooms.”

— Shirley Jackson

163. “He turned down the passageway to their little parlor, and sent the door swinging open with a crash. “Losing my temper will not help,” he said, and gave the door a vicious kick.”

— Shirley Jackson

164. “I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking.” She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn’t say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn’t talk to each other at all.”

— Shirley Jackson

165. “I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it’s dull no-one should have to read it anyway, and if it’s interesting I should be using it for a story.”

— Shirley Jackson

166. “During all of dinner the singing went on upstairs, and no one said a word.”

— Shirley Jackson

167. “On the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

— Shirley Jackson

168. “I must say, John, I never expected to find you all so nervous,” Mrs. Montague said. “I deplore fear in these matters.” She tapped her foot irritably. “You know perfectly well, John, that those who have passed beyond expect to see us happy and smiling; they want to know that we are thinking of them lovingly. The spirits dwelling in this house may be actually suffering because they are aware that you are afraid of them.”

— Shirley Jackson

169. “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. 2 NO HUMAN eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which.”

— Shirley Jackson

170. “In the night, in the dark.”

— Shirley Jackson

171. “The most important thing she had learned so far – and it was something to know, after only twelve hours – was that she need not pretend, always, to be competent or at home in a strange atmosphere. Other people, she had learned, were frequently uneasy and uncertain, lost their way or their money, were nervous at being approached by strangers or wary of officials.”

— Shirley Jackson

172. “Every touch he made on the house must be erased.”

— Shirley Jackson

173. “Horror is made of such base material – so easily rejected or dismissed – that it may be hard to accept my postulate that within the genre lies one of the last refuges of spirituality in this, our materialistic world. But it is a fact that, through the ages, most storytellers have had to resort to the fantastic in order to elevate their discourse to the level of parable.”

— Shirley Jackson

174. “Morgan had been, for a very long time, the most remarkable object in her own landscape, and anything stranger than herself was, to her mind, either an obvious sham, or non-existent.”

— Shirley Jackson

175. “I’d have to be pretty damn silly to think that people had rights to other people’s love; in my life I’ve earned more love and got less than anyone I know.”

— Shirley Jackson

176. “Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world.”

— Shirley Jackson

177. “My ambitions for you are slowly being realised, and, even though you are unhappy, console yourself with the thought that it was part of my plan for you to be unhappy for a while. The fact that you associate intimately with girls who do not care for the things you do should strengthen your own artistic integrity and fortify you against the world; remember, Natalie, your enemies will always come from the same place your friends do.”

— Shirley Jackson

178. “He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition. He even hated the round table and the succession of tablecloths, one pale blue with yellow leaves, one white with red and orange squares. He hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.”

— Shirley Jackson

179. “That’s wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn’t ever talk about whether people like you, that’s bad taste.”

— Shirley Jackson

180. “It was probable that everyone on Pepper Street knew that Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were, oddly, friends, but it is certain that no one was particularly interested in it. Both Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were so exactly the sort of people who want to hide, that the neighborhood was only thankful to have them hiding together, instead of intruding their modesty on busier people.”

— Shirley Jackson

181. “In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much. Principally, I don’t understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.”

— Shirley Jackson

182. “Is everyone really crazy but me?”

— Shirley Jackson

183. “An odd thought crossed her mind: she would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.”

— Shirley Jackson

184. “Their tongues will burn, I thought, as though they had eaten fire. Their throats will burn when the words come out, and in their bellies they will feel a torment hotter than a thousand fires.”

— Shirley Jackson

185. “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

186. “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

187. “In delay there lies no plenty.”

— Shirley Jackson

188. “If you are not ready in three minutes I will come in and drown you. I want my breakfast.”

— Shirley Jackson

189. “Although she would sooner have given up thinking than eating, she resented being pushed into depriving herself of either.”

— Shirley Jackson

190. “A courtesan, a pilgrim, a princess, and a bullfighter.”

— Shirley Jackson

191. “She forced herself to sit up primly on the edge of the marble bench, repressing firmly the nausea she felt at its warm pressure, and she smoothed the black linen of her dress across her lap, and tucked in her hair, which had somehow come loose, and crossed her ankles decently, and took her black-edged handkerchief from her bosom and dried her eyes and wiped away the dampness and grime from her face. Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.”

— Shirley Jackson

192. “The reassuring bulk of the college buildings showed ahead of her, and she looked fondly up at them and smiled. As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.”

— Shirley Jackson

193. “Ghosts are real, this much I know. There are things that tie them to a place, very much like they do us. Some remain tethered to a patch of land, a time and date, the spilling of blood, a terrible crime. But there are others... others that hold on to an emotion, a drive, loss, revenge, or love. Those... they never go away.”

— Shirley Jackson

194. “I decided that I was going to fewer student parties after I ripped part of the sleeve out of my black dress helping a freshman climb a fence. By the end of the first semester, what I wanted to do most in the world was invite a few of my husband’s students over for tea and drop them down the well.”

— Shirley Jackson

195. “I have been found wanting, Natalie thought; I have made myself unnacceptable and am not worthy.”

— Shirley Jackson

196. “I think that an atmosphere like this one can find out the flaws and faults and weaknesses in all of us, and break us apart in a matter of days. We have only one defense, and that is running away.”

— Shirley Jackson

197. “I personally preferred to chance the arsenic,” Uncle Julian said.”

— Shirley Jackson

198. “I wished they were all dead and I was walking on their bodies.”

— Shirley Jackson

199. “Unfortunately Hill House was a sad house almost from the beginning; Hugh Crain’s young wife died minutes before she first was to set eyes on the house, when the carriage bringing her here overturned in the driveway.”

— Shirley Jackson

200. “Passing through the outskirts of the city, she thought, it’s as though everything were traveling so fast that the solid stuff couldn’t stand it and were going to pieces under the strain, cornices blowing off and windows caving in. She knew she was afraid to say it truly, afraid to face the knowledge that it was a voluntary neck-breaking speed, a deliberate swirling faster and faster to end in destruction.”

— Shirley Jackson