Shirley Jackson Quotes

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?

You never know what you are going to want until you see it clearly.

Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words.

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

Everything is worse...if you think something is looking at you.

"... I never turned; it was enough to feel them all there without looking into their flat grey faces with hating eyes. I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, "Never let them see that you care," and "If you pay attention they'll only get worse," and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true."

I have been found wanting, Natalie thought; I have made myself unnacceptable and am not worthy.

I am home, she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.

I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

Remember, Natalie, your enemies will always come from the same place your friends do.

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.

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.

...you’d think my own face would know me...

In the darkness their feet felt that they were going downhill, and each privately and perversely accused the other of taking, deliberately, a path they had followed together once before in happiness.

Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said.
"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools.