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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
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It watches, he added suddenly. The house. It watches every move you make.
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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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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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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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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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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
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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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I delight in what I fear.
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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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Oh Constance, we are so happy.
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