Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Fancy was a liar. She had been with Aunt Fanny and dared not admit to running away. She had not been frightened, but she enjoyed teasing people weaker than herself. Not a servant, or an animal, or any child in the village near the house, would willingly go near her.”

— Shirley Jackson

252. “Eleanor waved back, sitting in joyful loneliness to finish her coffee while the gay stream tumbled along below her.”

— Shirley Jackson

253. “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

254. “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

255. “The journey itself was her positive action, her destination vague, unimagined, perhaps nonexistent. She meant to savor each turn of her traveling, loving the road and the trees and the houses and the small ugly towns, teasing herself with the notion that she might take it into her head to stop just anywhere and never leave again.”

— Shirley Jackson

256. “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

257. “Because Helen Clarke was ungraceful by nature, she managed to make the simple act of moving into a room and sitting down a complex ballet for three people; before Constance had quite finished speaking Helen Clarke jostled Mrs. Wright and sent Mrs. Wright sideways like a careening croquet ball off into the far corner of the room where she sat abruptly and clearly without intention upon a small and uncomfortable chair.”

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

259. “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

260. “She wants her cup of stars.” Eleanor.”

— Shirley Jackson

261. “Well, Eleanor thought, staring after the taxi, there’s one person, anyway, who will be praying for me. One person anyway.”

— Shirley Jackson

262. “Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; 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; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”

— Shirley Jackson

263. “Flowers under glass,” Luke said. “Tassels. I am beginning to fancy this house.”

— Shirley Jackson

264. “I could help her in her shop, Eleanor thought; she loves beautiful things and I would go with her to find them. We could go anywhere we pleased, to the edge of the world if we liked, and come back when we wanted to.”

— Shirley Jackson

265. “No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.”

— Shirley Jackson

266. “Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly.”

— Shirley Jackson

267. “There is no danger where there is nothing but love and sympathetic understanding.”

— Shirley Jackson

268. “She also depicted the cruel jokes of fate and chance unfolding in an amoral universe. It’s just that instead of doing it with men and guns, she chose to write about mad, lonely girls and big, sinister houses.”

— Shirley Jackson

269. “Good morning, Jonas. You are a furred lead, I think.”

— Shirley Jackson

270. “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

271. “We never know where our courage is coming from.”

— Shirley Jackson

272. “Poor Dr. Montague, Eleanor thought, standing aside to let the doctor take his wife into the dining room; he is so uncomfortable; I wonder how long she is going to stay. “I wonder how long she is going to stay?” Theodora whispered in her ear. “Maybe her suitcase is filled with ectoplasm,” Eleanor said hopefully. “And how long will you be able to stay?” Dr. Montague asked, sitting.”

— Shirley Jackson

273. “Eleanor felt the room rock madly, and time as she had always known time, stop.”

— Shirley Jackson

274. “Don’t be so afraid all the time. We never know where our courage is coming from.”

— Shirley Jackson

275. “I thought,” Eleanor said carefully, “that I might even look around. Old houses are usually cheap, you know, and it’s fun to make them over.” “Not around here,” the girl said. “Then,” Eleanor said, “there are no old houses around here? Back in the hills?” “Nope.” The man rose, taking change from his pocket, and spoke for the first time. “People leave this town,” he said. “They don’t come here.”

— Shirley Jackson

276. “It was an act of moral strength to lift her foot and set it on the bottom step, and she thought that her deep unwillingness to touch Hill House for the first time came directly from the vivid feeling that it had been waiting for her, evil, but patient.”

— Shirley Jackson

277. “I dread that it may be only a longing for annihilation. No person who has seen his own face plain can want to live longer.”

— Shirley Jackson

278. “Am I the public conscience? Expected always to say in cold words what the rest of them are too arrogant to recognise?”

— Shirley Jackson

279. “Stuff yourself full of kippers,” Luke said. “Then it will be impossible to feel anything at all.”

— Shirley Jackson

280. “Well I am here, I am at the heart, I have come through the maze – where is the secret I am to learn from my many agonies? Here I am, here I am, where is my reward? What have I earned, learned, spurned?”

— Shirley Jackson

281. “Imagine, always pretending to run a world. Always imitating the sort of people they think they might be if the world were the sort of world it isn’t. Pretending to be words like ‘normal’ and ‘wholesome’ and ‘honest’ and ‘decent’ and ‘self-respecting’ and all the rest, when even the words aren’t real. Imagine, being people.”

— Shirley Jackson

282. “You think we are right to stay?” “Right?” he said. “I think we are all incredibly silly to stay. 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.”

— Shirley Jackson

283. “She knew, of course, that he was delighting in exceeding his authority, as though once he moved to unlock the gate he would lose the little temporary superiority he thought he had.”

— Shirley Jackson

284. “It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will.”

— Shirley Jackson

285. “People leave this town,” he said. “They don’t come here.”

— Shirley Jackson

286. “When Mrs. Ferrier stepped inside our front door at one minute before three that afternoon it was perfectly clear to me without hesitation that we were not going to become fast friends.”

— Shirley Jackson

287. “Some rose petals are poisonous.”

— Shirley Jackson

288. “Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.”

— Shirley Jackson

289. “They made houses so oddly back when Hill House was built, she thought; they put towers and turrets and buttresses and wooden lace on them, even sometimes Gothic spires and gargoyles; nothing was ever left undecorated.”

— Shirley Jackson

290. “It was not possible to communicate with her because she would not abandon her coffee cup.”

— Shirley Jackson

291. “She probably watches every move we make, anyway; it’s probably part of what she agreed to.” “Agreed to with whom, I wonder? Count Dracula?” “You think he lives in Hill House?” “I think he spends all his week ends here; I swear I saw bats in the woodwork.”

— Shirley Jackson

292. “They spoke lightly, quickly, and gave one another fast, hidden, little curious glances, each of them wondering what secret terror had been tapped in the others, what changes might show in face or gesture, what unguarded weakness might have opened the way to ruin. “Did.”

— Shirley Jackson

293. “Some of these rooms are entirely inside rooms,” the doctor said from ahead of them. “No windows, no access to the outdoors at all. However, a series of enclosed rooms is not altogether surprising in a house of this period, particularly when you recall that what windows they did have were heavily shrouded with hangings and draperies within, and shrubbery without. Ah.”

— Shirley Jackson

294. “She had done so much to preserve herself from this kind of captivity and had taken inevitably one of the many roads which would lead her to the same torment; she was helpless among people who hated her and showed it by holding her motionless until they should choose to release her.”

— Shirley Jackson

295. “After all,′ said the old lady dreamily, with raindrops in her hair, ’we don’t always see ahead, into things that are going to happen.”

— Shirley Jackson

296. “Marble is always a shock,” she said. “It never feels like you think it’s going to. I suppose a lifesize statue looks enough like a real person to make you expect to feel skin.”

— Shirley Jackson

297. “God has given me blood to drink.”

— Shirley Jackson

298. “I’ll tell them,’ she said, and the baby looked at me cynically.”

— Shirley Jackson

299. “For one thing, it had suddenly come to Natalie that when people were sober they repudiated everything they had done when they were drunk, and when they were drunk they repudiated everything they had done when they were sober.”

— Shirley Jackson

300. “It was not pleasant sitting on the porch after Tony had gone; a spot where two people have been talking, however briefly, is not after that a spot for one person to sit alone.”

— Shirley Jackson