310 Quotes by Shirley Jackson

We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.

He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition. He even hated the round table and the succession of tablecloths, one pale blue with yellow leaves, one white with red and orange squares. He hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.

I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.''I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.

They are the children of the strangers,I told her. They have no faces. They have eyes.Pretend they are birds. They cant see us. They don't know it yet. they don't want to believe it, but they wont ever see us again.

Change layover the stairs and the kitchen and the garden like fog.

Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by.

Well," she asked, "how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house?""It's perfectly fine," Luke said, "perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.

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.

The reassuring bulk of the college buildings showed ahead of her, and she looked fondly up at them and smiled. As she had never been before, she was now alone, and grown-up, and powerful, and not at all afraid.