21 Quotes by Ruth Franklin

Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally – if at all – would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless – if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate.

By the end of the first semester, what I wanted to do most in the world was invite a few of my husband’s students over for tea and drop them down the well.

Brown, they would later write, had taught them that the goal of reading and criticizing was “to know and understand, not to like or dislike, and the aim of writing was to get down what you wanted to say, not to gesticulate or impress.

She knew also, however, that she would have a rare chance to re-create herself, as had her ancestors, migrating westward nearly a century earlier.

If Shirley Jackson’s intent was to symbolize into complete mystification, and at the same time be gratuitously disagreeable, she certainly succeeded.

Past the turn I might find a mark of Constance’s foot, because she sometimes came that far to wait for me, but most of Constance’s prints were in the garden and in the house. Today she had come to the end of the garden, and I saw her as soon as I came around the turn; she was standing with the house behind her, in the sunlight, and I ran to meet her. “Merricat,” she said, smiling at me, “look how far I came today.” – We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

When gold was first discovered at Sutter’s Mill, back in 1848, San Francisco, still in its infancy, was barely settled. New arrivals lived in canvas tents – poor shelter from the rainy weather. The city’s first buildings were made from ships run aground in the harbor. In 1849, the population was estimated at two thousand men and almost no women.

No particular event appears to have sent her into this downward spiral. More likely, Jackson was overwhelmed – for the first time, but hardly the last – by the constellation of social anxiety and familial pressure that left her feeling accepted by no one.

I have never liked the theory that poltergeists only come into houses where there are children, because I think it is simply too much for any one house to have poltergeists and children. – “The Ghosts of Loiret.