Top 350 Shirley Jackson Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

322. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

332. “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.”

— Shirley Jackson

333. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

335. “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

336. “We have got to get a bigger house,” I said. “Don’t be silly,” my husband said, reading. “There is no bigger house.” “A new house?” said Jannie. “Can I have a room of my own?” When I went down to the grocery the next morning the grocer said he heard we were thinking of moving.”

— Shirley Jackson

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “Some rose petals are poisonous.”

— Shirley Jackson

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

348. “I never yet knew anyone who could not fall asleep with Richardson being read aloud to him.”

— Shirley Jackson

349. “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

350. “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