Quote

I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.

Shirley Jackson

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Shirley Jackson
Age: 48 †
Born: 1916
Born: December 14
Died: 1965
Died: September 8
Author
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Shirley Hardie Jackson
Fear
Take
Consolidate
Whole
Comprehend
Work
Scary
Make
Afraid
Always
Loved
Situation
Use

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I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
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The idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely.
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Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
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It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.
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We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.
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We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
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The sight of one's own heart is degrading people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.
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Fear, the doctor said, is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.
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in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
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I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
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Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
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I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
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I can't help it when people are frightened, says Merricat. I always want to frighten them more.
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February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.
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It was one of those winter days that suddenly dream of spring, when the sky is blue and soft and clear, and the wind has dropped its voice and whispers instead of screaming, and the sun is out and the trees look surprised, and over everything there is the faintest, palest tint of green.
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On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.
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Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.
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Oh Constance, we are so happy.
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Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children.
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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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