Quotes by Shirley Jackson

“[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .”

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

“It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a 4-day vacation, the thin veneer of family wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities.”

“It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.”

“I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. Im not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes.”

“They stayed off the interstates because they heard that [those roads] were a mess,”

“They were worried that it might get stolen, so they kept it hidden in the bottom of the truck, ... When they refueled the truck, they went behind a building so no one would see them.”

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

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....

Tell me something that only I will ever know, was perhaps what she wanted to ask him, or, What will you remember me by? - or even, Nothing of the least importance has ever belonged to me; can you help?

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.

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.

I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon.

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mothers delusions. Now, I dont know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mothers delusions, and theyre solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do---and watch this carefully please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.

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

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

Mrs. Arnold, the doctor said, coming around the desk, were not going to help things any this way.What is going to help? Mrs. Arnold said. Is everyone really crazy but me?Mrs. Arnold, the doctor said severely, I want you to get hold of yourself. In a disoriented world like ours today, alienation from reality frequently--Disoriented, Mrs. Arnold said. She stood up. Alienation, she said. Reality. Before the doctor could stop her she walked to the door and opened it. Reality, she said, and went out.