Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
General
Village
Reader
Settings
Dramatization
Present
Readers
Inhumanity
Violence
Shock
Rite
Story
Suppose
Hoped
Lives
Setting
Graphic
Stories
Particularly
Pointless
Ancient
Brutal

More quotes by Shirley Jackson

Image
Oh Constance, we are so happy.
Shirley Jackson
Image
All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
Shirley Jackson
Image
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
I delight in what I fear.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
I can't help it when people are frightened, says Merricat. I always want to frighten them more.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson
Image
I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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
Image
in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
Shirley Jackson
Image
It watches, he added suddenly. The house. It watches every move you make.
Shirley Jackson
Image
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.
Shirley Jackson