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Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

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
Disrespectful
Memoir
Savages
Among
Children
Life

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The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
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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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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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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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Wear your boots if you wander today
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in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
Shirley Jackson
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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 am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
Shirley Jackson
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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 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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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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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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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.
Shirley Jackson
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I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
Shirley Jackson
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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.
Shirley Jackson
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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.
Shirley Jackson
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I delight in what I fear.
Shirley Jackson
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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.
Shirley Jackson
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It watches, he added suddenly. The house. It watches every move you make.
Shirley Jackson
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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.
Shirley Jackson