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

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. Furthermore, he hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by described.

— Shirley Jackson

I delight in what I fear.

— Shirley Jackson

I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.

— Shirley Jackson

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

— Shirley Jackson