Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Nothing in this house moves until you look away, and then you just catch something from the corner of your eye.”

— Shirley Jackson

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

— Shirley Jackson

260. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

268. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

278. “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

279. “Would you think I ought to give up my painting just for a home and a couple of lousy children with running noses?”

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

281. “She was well away from the city now, watching for the turning onto Route 39, that magic thread of road Dr. Montague had chosen for her, out of all the roads in the world, to bring her safely to him and to Hill House; no other road could lead her from where she was to where she wanted to be.”

— Shirley Jackson

282. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

284. “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

285. “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

286. “Why don’t you grow up by yourself?”

— Shirley Jackson

287. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

290. “Little Natalie, never rest until you have uncovered your essential self. Remember that. Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colours.”

— Shirley Jackson

291. “When Jannie came home from school that afternoon she said that her teacher had put it into the class news that Jannie’s mommy and daddy were going to get a new house and Jannie would walk to school instead of taking the bus.”

— Shirley Jackson

292. “Some rose petals are poisonous.”

— Shirley Jackson

293. “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

294. “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.”

— Shirley Jackson

295. “Don’t be hypnotized by the sanctity of the superficial rhythm of humdrum life, Jackson warns, for under the surface of things, people change, sometimes irrevocably, and yet they may appear unaltered.”

— Shirley Jackson

296. “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

297. “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

298. “I dusted the wedding-cake trim with a cloth on the end of a broom, staggering, and looking up and pretending that the ceiling was the floor and I was sweeping, hovering busily in space looking down at my broom, weightless and flying until the room swung dizzily and I was again on the floor looking up.”

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

300. “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