Shirley Jackson Quotes

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.

Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

That was the thing about being on the inside: the world was just going on, even when it seemed like time for you had stopped for good.

The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

Up until I was eleven years old, I thought I was the only one of my kind in the world. I couldn't find anybody else who felt as I did.

After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

Thank god, I'm not from this world.

I have not loved the world, nor the world me.

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

My thoughts and I were of another world.

I can detach myself from the world. If there is a better world to detach oneself from than the one functioning at the moment I have yet to hear of it.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I only had the right to sit in the shadows of the world,in complete silence. Whether I was laughed at, or told I was discusting, or thought of as unpleasant I would sit in the shadows.

For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.

I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.

Why can’t the world hear? I ask myself. Within a few moments I ask it many times. Because it doesn’t care, I finally answer, and I know I’m right. It’s like I’ve been chosen. But chosen for what? I ask.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.

The moment you enter into the world of words you start falling away from that which is. The more you enter into language, the farther you are away from existence.