Shirley Jackson Quotes

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.

Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; And e'en the dearest--that I love the best-- Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

Oh yes! The one man in the world who never believes he's mad is the madman.

The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon, When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls.

Earth, left silent by the wind of night,Seems shrunken 'neath the gray unmeasured height.

Insanity is just a state of mind.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane?

If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.

It is moonlight. Alone in the silence I ascend my stairs once more, While waves remote in pale blue starlight Crash on a white sand shore. It is moonlight. The garden is silent. I stand in my room alone. Across my wall, from the far-off moon, A rain of fire is thrown. There are houses hanging above the stars, And stars hung under the sea, And a wind from the long blue vault of time Waves my curtains for me. I wait in the dark once more, swung between space and space: Before the mirror I lift my hands And face my remembered face.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.”.

May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other.