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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
Trying
Ruins
Slowly
Shame
Moved
Toward
Understand
House
Ugliness
Together
Ruin

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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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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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I delight in what I fear.
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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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It watches, he added suddenly. The house. It watches every move you make.
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I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
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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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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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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 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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Oh Constance, we are so happy.
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I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four, he said, patting his hands together. I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie. Constance, my dear? Yes, Uncle Julian? I am going to say that my wife was a beautiful woman.
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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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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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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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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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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 would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
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