Quote

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

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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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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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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
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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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For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.
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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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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 shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
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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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Oh Constance, we are so happy.
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