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

— Shirley Jackson

In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much. Principally, I don’t understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.

— Shirley Jackson

In the country of the story the writer is king.

— Shirley Jackson

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

— Shirley Jackson

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.

— Shirley Jackson

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

— Shirley Jackson

It’s not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.

— Shirley Jackson

I was never a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. Furthermore, I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. Furthermore, I have cleaned homes.

— Shirley Jackson

I was thinking that being a demon and a ghost must be very difficult, even for Charles; if he ever forgot, or let his disguise drop for a minute, he would be recognized at once and driven away; he must be extremely careful to use the same voice every time, and present the same face and the same manner without a slip; he must be constantly on guard against betraying himself. I wondered if he would turn back to his true self when he was dead.

— Shirley Jackson

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elbert's 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.

— Shirley Jackson