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We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.

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
Understand
House
Ugliness
Together
Ruin
Trying
Ruins
Slowly
Shame
Moved
Toward

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In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.
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It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a 4-day vacation, the thin veneer of family wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities.
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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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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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We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.
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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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All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.
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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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Wear your boots if you wander today
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He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient he is simply not very interesting.
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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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I delight in what I fear.
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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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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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All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
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For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.
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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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I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.
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