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Shirley Jackson Quotes

Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer. She was popular during her life, and her work has received increased attention from literary critics in recent years. She has been cited as an influence on a diverse set of authors, including Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Sarah Waters, Nigel Kneale, Joanne Harris and Richard Matheson.

She is best known for the short story "The Lottery" , which reveals a secret, sinister underside to a bucolic American village, and for The Haunting of Hill House , which is widely considered to be one of the best ghost stories ever written. In her critical biography of Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when "The Lottery" was published in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received". Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse". In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions:



Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.



Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years". Hyman insisted that the dark visions found in Jackson's work were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but, rather, comprised "a sensitive and faithful anatomy" of the Cold War era in which she lived, "fitting symbols for [a] distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb." Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned 'The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story".

✵ 14. December 1916 – 8. August 1965  •  Other names 雪莉·傑克森, شرلی جکسن, შირლი ჯექსონი

Works

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
The Haunting of Hill House
The Lottery
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson: 49 quotes4 likes

Famous Shirley Jackson Quotes

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson Quotes about housing

“Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Ch. 1
Context: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

“Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Context: This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

“No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Ch. 2

Shirley Jackson Quotes

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I delight in what I fear.”

Shirley Jackson

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“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.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“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.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“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.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

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

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“When shall we live if not now?”

Shirley Jackson book The Sundial

Source: The Sundial

“On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“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!”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“God! Whose hand was I holding?”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

Source: The Lottery (1948)

“Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

“Oh Constance, we are so happy.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.”

Shirley Jackson

Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Harcraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1954)

“The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

The Lottery (1948)

“Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools, he said. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery," he added petulantly.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

The Lottery (1948)

“One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. It had simply never occurred to me that these the millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me: "Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker," she wrote sternly; "it does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?"”

Shirley Jackson

Lecture (1960); printed in her collection, Come Along with Me (1968)

“Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

The Lottery (1948)

“"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

The Lottery (1948)

“Cocoa? Cocoa! Damn miserable puny stuff, fit for kittens and unwashed boys. Did Shakespeare drink cocoa?”

Shirley Jackson book The Bird's Nest

The Bird's Nest (1954)

“Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Dr. Montague
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

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

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

The Lottery (1948)

“Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

Shirley Jackson

Regarding her story The Lottery, in the San Francisco Chronicle (22 July 1948)

“Some places have already quit lotteries.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

Mrs. Adams said.
"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."
The Lottery (1948)

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