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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Shirley Jackson

Image
All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
Wear your boots if you wander today
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
It watches, he added suddenly. The house. It watches every move you make.
Shirley Jackson
Image
Oh Constance, we are so happy.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.
Shirley Jackson
Image
I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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?
Shirley Jackson