Quote

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.

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
Reasonable
Cannot
Patterns
Logic
Doctors
Meet
Relinquishing
Fight
Halfway
Willing
Yield
Fighting
Doctor

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Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my 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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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 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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We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
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in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
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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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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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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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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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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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Wear your boots if you wander today
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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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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
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