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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.

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
True
Vacation
Great
Thin
Long
Stress
Personality
Almost
Veneer
Belief
Personalities
Times
Wears
Family
Revealed

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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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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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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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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 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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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 moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
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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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I delight in what I fear.
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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.
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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 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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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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Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
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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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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
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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 shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
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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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