310 Quotes by Shirley Jackson

By the time she was standing up and in her bathrobe the day had fallen into its routine; after the first involuntary rebellion against every day’s alarm she subsided regularly into the shower, make-up, dress, breakfast schedule which would take her through the beginning of the day and out into the morning where she could forget the green grass and the hot sun and begin to look forward to dinner and the evening.

I am caught in a kind of wonder, I am still with joy.

Anything you raise by the way of spirits you have to put back yourself.

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

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...

An odd thought crossed her mind: she would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.

Horror is made of such base material – so easily rejected or dismissed – that it may be hard to accept my postulate that within the genre lies one of the last refuges of spirituality in this, our materialistic world. But it is a fact that, through the ages, most storytellers have had to resort to the fantastic in order to elevate their discourse to the level of parable.

Do you always go where you’re not wanted?” Eleanor smiled placidly. “I’ve never been wanted anywhere,” she said.

Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying, “Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor.