Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I personally preferred to chance the arsenic,” Uncle Julian said.”

— Shirley Jackson

202. “I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all; whatever it wants of me it can have.”

— Shirley Jackson

203. “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

204. “Abandoning a lifelong belief that to name happiness is to dissipate it, she smiled at herself in the mirror and told herself silently, You are happy, Eleanor, you have finally been given a part of your measure of happiness.”

— Shirley Jackson

205. “Eternal damnation is the lot of mankind; neither tears, nor reparation, can undo Man’s heritage of sin.”

— Shirley Jackson

206. “Seit dem Tod ihrer Mutter war ihre Schwester der einzige Mensch auf der Welt, den sie aufrichtig hasste.”

— Shirley Jackson

207. “I think we are only afraid of ourselves,” the doctor said slowly. “No,” Luke said. “Of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise.”

— Shirley Jackson

208. “Brandy, anyone? My passion for spirits – ” “No.” Theodora giggled wildly. “Not that pun,” she said.”

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

210. “Das ist zu viel, dachte sie, ich leiste Verzicht auf dieses Selbst, danke ab, gebe freiwillig ab, was ich sowieso nie haben wollte; was es auch von mir will, kann es haben.”

— Shirley Jackson

211. “In any case,” the doctor said, “I will not sleep for an hour or so yet; at my age an hour’s reading before bedtime is essential, and I wisely brought Pamela with me. If any of you has trouble sleeping, I will read aloud to you. I never yet knew anyone who could not fall asleep with Richardson being read aloud to him.”

— Shirley Jackson

212. “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.”

— Shirley Jackson

213. “Foosball is a vile game... for vile people.” – Shirley Jackson, 1953.”

— Shirley Jackson

214. “Sing before breakfast you’ll cry ’before night.”

— Shirley Jackson

215. “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

216. “Now I will be heard, and when I choose to be heard, the lowest legions of hell may turn in vain to silence me and when I choose to speak not all the winds of earth can drown my voice.”

— Shirley Jackson

217. “Use all the tools at your disposal. The language is infinitely flexible, and your use of it should be completely deliberate. Never forget the grotesque effect of the absolutely wrong words.”

— Shirley Jackson

218. “I am walking on their bodies, I thought, we are having lunch in the garden and Uncle Julian is wearing his shawl.”

— Shirley Jackson

219. “Mary Katherine must never be punished. Must never be sent to bed without her dinner. Mary Katherine will never allow herself to do anything inviting punishment.”

— Shirley Jackson

220. “It is unholy because it is heretic. It is foul. It is abominable to need something so badly that you cannot picture living without it. It is a contradiction to the condition of mankind.”

— Shirley Jackson

221. “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.”

— Shirley Jackson

222. “No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself.”

— Shirley Jackson

223. “It was going to happen sooner or later, in any case,” Eleanor said. “But of course no matter when it happened it was going to be my fault.”

— Shirley Jackson

224. “I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.”

— Shirley Jackson

225. “Hugh Crain,” Theodora said, “you were a dirty old man, and you made a dirty old house and if you can still hear me from anywhere I would like to tell you to your face that I genuinely hope you will spend eternity in that foul horrible picture and never stop burning for a minute.”

— Shirley Jackson

226. “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.”

— Shirley Jackson

227. “Because this was a time and a land where enchantments were swiftly made and broken she wanted to linger over her lunch, knowing that Hill House always waited for her at the end of her day.”

— Shirley Jackson

228. “Eleanor, watching, thought wryly that it might sometimes be oppressive to be for long around one so immediately in tune, so perceptive, as Theodora.”

— Shirley Jackson

229. “I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.” Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. “The way you did before?” she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. “Yes,” I said after a minute, “the way I did before.”

— Shirley Jackson

230. “Hill House went dancing,′ Theodora said, ’taking us along a mad midnight fling. At least I think it was dancing; it might have been turning somersaults.”

— Shirley Jackson

231. “I’m sure I’ve been here before,” Eleanor said. “In a book of fairy tales, perhaps.”

— Shirley Jackson

232. “Luke,” she asked, going slowly for fear of ridicule, “why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?”

— Shirley Jackson

233. “Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.”

— Shirley Jackson

234. “No one ever remembers just a bad thing, they remember all around it, all that happened before it and after it, and of course, she told herself consolingly, one bad thing is probably enough.”

— Shirley Jackson

235. “The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,” and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened.”

— Shirley Jackson

236. “I assure you,” the doctor said, “that Hill House will be quiet tonight. There is a pattern to these things, as though psychic phenomena were subject to laws of a very particular sort.”

— Shirley Jackson

237. “Change layover the stairs and the kitchen and the garden like fog.”

— Shirley Jackson

238. “I thought we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale.”

— Shirley Jackson

239. “Perhaps it has us now, this house, perhaps it will not let us go.”

— Shirley Jackson

240. “The Amanita phalloides... holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting-.”

— Shirley Jackson

241. “I don’t stay after I set out dinner,” Mrs. Dudley went on. “Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.”

— Shirley Jackson

242. “Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.”

— Shirley Jackson

243. “The weather falls more gently on some places than on others, the world looks down more paternally on some people. Some spots are proverbially warm, and keep, through falling snow, their untarnished reputations as summer resorts; some people are automatically above suspicion.”

— Shirley Jackson

244. “Good morning – through in a minute – I’ll leave the tub filled for you.”

— Shirley Jackson

245. “Maybe you’ll get onto the other side of that mirror in the new clean world. Maybe you’ll look through from the other side and see this world again and go around crying that you wish some big thing would happen and wipe out that one and send you back here. Like I keep trying to tell you, it doesn’t matter which world you’re in.”

— Shirley Jackson

246. “All the millions of things we possessed as a family were inside the house, but, inexorably, there came one shocking moment when we discovered that the house was full.”

— Shirley Jackson

247. “You all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different. But I don’t suppose people get changed any by just a new world. And anyway that world isn’t any more real than this one.”

— Shirley Jackson

248. “None of these things bothered us excessively; we have always been a family that carries bewilderment like a banner, and odd new confusions do not actually seem to be any more bewildering than the ones we invent for ourselves; moreover, in each of these cases it was easier to believe that nothing had happened, or that it was of no importance anyway.”

— Shirley Jackson

249. “God God,” Eleanor said, flinging herself out of bed and across the room to stand shuddering in a corner, “God God – whose hand was I holding?”

— Shirley Jackson

250. “Eleanor – “I plan to stay up and read for a while.” “Are you still reading Pamela?” Eleanor asked the doctor. “Volume two. I have three volumes to go, and then I shall begin Clarissa Harlowe, I think. Perhaps Luke would care to borrow – ” “No, thanks,” Luke said hastily. “I have a suitcase full of mystery stories.”

— Shirley Jackson