Quote

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.

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
Think
Four
Slight
Thinking
Lying
Chapter
Constance
Woman
Uncles
Patting
Beautiful
Chapters
Commence
Hands
Forty
Julian
Together
Dear
Outright
Going
Shall
Exaggeration
Really
Wife
Uncle

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For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.
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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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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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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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It watches, he added suddenly. The house. It watches every move you make.
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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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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
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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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Wear your boots if you wander today
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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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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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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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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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in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
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It was one of those winter days that suddenly dream of spring, when the sky is blue and soft and clear, and the wind has dropped its voice and whispers instead of screaming, and the sun is out and the trees look surprised, and over everything there is the faintest, palest tint of green.
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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 cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
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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 moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
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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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