Shirley Jackson Quotes

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be it would. You see?

Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.

I'm a weird mixture of being cynical but at the same time wanting to live in a world where Bigfoot lives.

Watch very closely as the magical angel and I are swallowed by the rainbow twister, and left stranded on the glitter way.

I am probably in the sky, flying with the fish, or maybe in the ocean, swimming with the pigeons. See, my world is different.

I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes. I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets. Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace. I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve. I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain. I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods. And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.

Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing i ever saw in my life!

I had a dream, which was not at all a dream.

I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic Reality.

Don't we want to escape our real world and go into something larger than that, simpler than that, more beautiful or darker?

I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.

I want to make a world more magical than my own. I don't care if it makes sense, I don't care if it's ridiculed or if, rather than a neat round planet that goes around forever, it ends with a cliff that falls off into nothing. I want to have my eyes wide open, and I want to see this room and at the same time, not this room.

OK," Josh said evenly, "I've seen men made of mud, I guess I can accept spying rats. Do they talk?" he wondered aloud. Don't be ridiculous," Flamel snapped, "They're rats." Josh really didn't think it was a ridiculous suggestion.

I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this is what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway.

He paints a dolphin in the woods, a boar in the waves.

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it's getting late. I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields.

I don't believe in things like that - fairies or brownies or magic or anything. It's old-fashioned.' 'Well, we must be jolly old-fashioned then,' said Bessie. 'Because we not only believe in the Faraway Tree and love our funny friends there, but we go to see them too - and we visit the lands at the top of the Tree as well!

We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side.

Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.

There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.

I rather like the smell of absurdity in the morning.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.

I like both slapstick and contradiction. Like philosophers.