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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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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
Looks
Bodies
Heart
Souls
People
Meant
Sight
Given
Body
Degrading
Soul
Inward
Look
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For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.
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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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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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I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
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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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in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
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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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All cat stories start with this statement: My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
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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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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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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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Oh Constance, we are so happy.
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Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
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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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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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Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Shirley Jackson
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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.
Shirley Jackson
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It watches, he added suddenly. The house. It watches every move you make.
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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 can't help it when people are frightened, says Merricat. I always want to frighten them more.
Shirley Jackson