Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “It is not proven that Elizabeth’s person equilibrium was set off balance by the slant of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elizabeth who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same time.”

— Shirley Jackson

303. “Some lives, ending as Miss Fielding’s would, leave a grain of memory, like a grain of sand, in the depths of another mind, a grain of sand which is like the constant irritation under an oyster’s shell, eventually to grow with coating after coating of disguising beauty into a pearl. Sometime this memory would be pried loose, in its rounded beauty, to stand by itself as an object of delight.”

— Shirley Jackson

304. “We bought the big white house, at last, by merely signing our names on a piece of paper. Mr. Gore and Mr. Andrews down at the bank arranged the financial transference with an almost invisible maneuver of figures on a card. When my husband asked if we could borrow our money right back again and use the house as security, everybody laughed.”

— Shirley Jackson

305. “It has always been my opinion that princesses are confined in towers only because they choose to stay confined, and the only dragon required to keep them there was their own desire to be kept.”

— Shirley Jackson

306. “Ask your mommy can we have two chairs out here,” Billy said. “Then we can pretend the whole garden is our house.”

— Shirley Jackson

307. “Beneath the trees it was not dark as a room is dark when the lights are put out, the artificial darkness which comes when an artificial light is gone; it was the deep natural darkness which comes with a forsaking of natural light.”

— Shirley Jackson

308. “But some of us go around hoping.”

— Shirley Jackson

309. “If I am not the legal resident of the apartment you cannot evict me. You cannot evict Mrs. Tuttle, who is the legal resident of the apartment, because she is not living here. Unless you accept my check you are not going to receive any rent for the apartment at all because you cannot rent it to anyone else while I am living here because you cannot evict me so they could move in. Mrs. Tuttle will not pay the rent because she is not living here. Sincerely, Marian Griswold.”

— Shirley Jackson

310. “It is almost silly to say that no one will read a story which does not interest him. Yet many writers forget it. They write a story which interests them, forgetting that the particular emotional investment they brought to the incident had never been communicated to the reader because, writing the story, they wrote down only what happened and not what was felt.”

— Shirley Jackson

311. “Era una sconosciuta in un mondo di sconosciuti ed erano sconosciuti anche quelli che si era lasciata alle spalle.”

— Shirley Jackson

312. “Elizabeth watched him: this is Robbie, she was thinking, I know what he’s going to do and what he’s going to say and what tie he’s going to wear every day in the week, and for eleven years I have known these things and for eleven years I have been wondering how to say things to make him understand; and eleven years ago we sat here and held hands and he said we were going to be successful.”

— Shirley Jackson

313. “No, she thought, you are not going to catch me so cheaply; I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings; this man is a parrot.”

— Shirley Jackson

314. “Remember, this – this is the end we have waited for so long.”

— Shirley Jackson

315. “The road to hell is very likely paved with my notes for stories and books and articles.”

— Shirley Jackson

316. “One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.”

— Shirley Jackson

317. “I like writing fiction better than anything, because just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words.”

— Shirley Jackson

318. “Some inner integrity had preserved their shop from being a shoppe.”

— Shirley Jackson

319. “Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books.”

— Shirley Jackson

320. “A man in Texas won a divorce from his wife because she tore out the last chapter of every mystery story he borrowed from the library.”

— Shirley Jackson

321. “Now I want to say something about words artificially weighted; you can, and frequently must, make a word carry several meanings or messages in your story if you use the word right. This is a kind of shorthand.”

— Shirley Jackson

322. “She was watching Aunt Morgen carefully, looking at the big earnest ugly face and the false little smile and the mouth still a little open, and she thought, people shouldn’t ever look closely at one another, they’re not like pictures.”

— Shirley Jackson

323. “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

324. “Now what was here, she wondered, what was here and is gone, or what was going to be here and never came?”

— Shirley Jackson

325. “It is my hope to, one day, share my love for HPL with the world.”

— Shirley Jackson

326. “I think they want the same things you do, only you would... inherit them, so to speak, just by growing up. Things like excitement, and new experiences, and all kinds of strange and wonderful things happening; you get them anyway, just by the process of growing older, but for them... they’ve already outgrown all they know and they want to try it all over again. Even at my age, you keep thinking you’ve missed so much, and you get older all the time.”

— Shirley Jackson

327. “Essex made a face. ‘Ambrosia is not my drink.”

— Shirley Jackson

328. “No one, she thought, can catch me now; they don’t even know which way I’m going.”

— Shirley Jackson

329. “A television set in Florida refused to let itself be turned off; until its owners took an axe to it, it continued, on or off, presenting inferior music and stale movies and endless, maddening advertising, and even under the axe, with its last sigh, it died with the praises of a hair tonic on its lips.”

— Shirley Jackson

330. “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

331. “It was an unpleasant business, like all family quarrels, and as in all family quarrels incredibly harsh and cruel things were said on either side.”

— Shirley Jackson

332. “I have no way of knowing what we may be called upon to do for ourselves.”

— Shirley Jackson

333. “Mr. Halloran had been crying, but this was not unusual; since he had been made to realize that he would not, now, be vouchsafed a second run at youth he cried easily and often.”

— Shirley Jackson

334. “It is most agreeable to be a writer of fiction for several reasons–one of the most important being, of course that you can persuade people that it is really work if you look haggard enough–but perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words.”

— Shirley Jackson

335. “If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented.”

— Shirley Jackson

336. “On the other hand,” the doctor continued behind her, “a Fielding novel comparable in length, although hardly in subject matter, would never do for very young children. I even have doubts about Sterne –.”

— Shirley Jackson

337. “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

338. “Let us have a little more brandy,′ the doctor said, ’and I will tell you the story of Hill House.”

— Shirley Jackson

339. “By changing the emphasis and angle on this little plot we can make it say almost anything we like. There is certainly no need to worry about whether any of this is true, or actually happened; it is as true as you make it. The important thing is that it be true in the story, and actually happen there.”

— Shirley Jackson

340. “Everything is worse,” he said, looking at Eleanor, “if you think something is looking at you.”

— Shirley Jackson

341. “We had three more attics, but one of them was full of old lumber and bricks left over from the various additions that had been built onto the house, and one of them was full of bats, and the last could only be reached by climbing through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the next-to-the-last attic and even if I could get past the bats and through the lumber and bricks I did not think I could keep taking the baby up and down through a trapdoor.”

— Shirley Jackson

342. “I dislike all the beginnings of conversations where people ask one another as subtly as possible how old they are, and what their names are, and how they are feeling these days.”

— Shirley Jackson

343. “I think we are only afraid of ourselves,” the doctor said slowly.”

— Shirley Jackson

344. “I think it cannot be too firmly emphasized that in the writing of any kind of fiction no scene and no character can be allowed to wander off by itself; there must be some furthering of the story in every sentence, and even the most fleeting background characters must partake of the story in some way; they must be characters peculiar to this story and no other.”

— Shirley Jackson

345. “She is hysterical,” said Mrs. Halloran. “Slap her quite firmly in the face.”

— Shirley Jackson

346. “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

347. “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

348. “Eleanor felt, as she had the day before, that the conversation was being skillfully guided away from the thought of fear, so very present in her own mind. Perhaps she was to be allowed to speak occasionally for all of them so that, quieting her, they quieted themselves and could leave the subject behind them;.”

— Shirley Jackson

349. “When Luke and I are called outside, and you two are kept imprisoned inside – doesn’t it begin to seem – and his voice is very quiet – doesn’t it begin to seem that the intention is, somehow, to separate us?”

— Shirley Jackson

350. “The wet raincoat smell was exciting, carrying with it remotely the institutional smells of the college, a faint echo of a cologne Natalie had never worn in her life; near the pocket was a cigarette burn she had not made; the raincoat was in itself a symbol of going and coming, of wishing and fearing, or, precisely, the going out of a warm, firelit house into the heartbreaking cold.”

— Shirley Jackson