Quote

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.

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
Back
Ocean
Grass
Going
Moved
Trees
Long
Looked
Forth
Never
Fields
Clouds
Like
Tree
Although
Breeze
Seen
Field
Cloud
Moving
Distance
Shadows
Today
Shadow
Passed

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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
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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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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 delight in what I fear.
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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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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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in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
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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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For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.
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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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All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
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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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