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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
Slowly
Shame
Moved
Toward
Understand
House
Ugliness
Together
Ruin
Trying
Ruins

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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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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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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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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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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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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
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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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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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All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?
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I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
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in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
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I delight in what I fear.
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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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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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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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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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