Shirley Jackson Quotes

Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants die within its walls.

"When I was a child," Theodora said lazily, "' — many years ago,' Doctor, as you put it so tactfully — I was whipped for throwing a brick through a greenhouse roof. I remember I thought about if for a long time, remembering the whipping but remembering also the lovely crash, and after thinking about it very seriously I went out and did it again."

She nearly stopped forever just outside Ashton, because she came to a tiny cottage buried in a garden. I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin.

Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life.

"We believed optimistically that Laurie was a reformed character. I told my husband, on the last day of Laurie's confinement, that actually one good scare like that could probably mark a child for life, and my husband pointed out that kids frequently have an instinctive desire to follow the good example rather than the bad, once they find out which is which. We agreed that a good moral background and thorough grounding in the Hardy Boys would always tell in the long run.

("Arch-Criminal")"

…Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

"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."

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

Where did he go, your father?'

'Africa.'

'What for?'

'To shoot lions, of course.'

'What on Earth for?' said Mrs. Willow blankly.

'Some people shoot lions,' the girl said pleasantly, 'and some people do not shoot lions. My father is one of the people who do.

I assume then, that you have no real faith in the fondness any of the rest of us may feel for you?'
'None,' said Mrs. Halloran.

We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others; I had made a monster and turned it loose upon the world and — since recognition is, after all, the cruelest pain — had seen it clearly and with understanding.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

Cocoa? Cocoa! Damn miserable puny stuff, fit for kittens and unwashed boys. Did Shakespeare drink cocoa?

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.

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.