310 Quotes by Shirley Jackson

He turned down the passageway to their little parlor, and sent the door swinging open with a crash. “Losing my temper will not help,” he said, and gave the door a vicious kick.

Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.

I remember coming home from school with friends who were startled at the percussive sound of my parents’ typewriters both going at once, pounding away in different rooms.

A thought of the world swept over her, of people living around her, singing, dancing, laughing; it seemed unexpectedly and joyfully that in all this great world of the city there were a thousand places where she might go and live in deep happiness, among friends who were waiting for her here in the stirring crowds of the city.

Wear your boots if you wander today.

The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.

Say Morg – you mind if I use the rest of your bath salts? There’s only a little left.

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.

People,” the doctor said sadly, “are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.