Shirley Jackson Quotes

I told my mother-in-law my house is your house. So she sold it.

It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.

I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house

Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.

I think I've learned that if you have a house, you end up living in the kitchen, so if you have one big kitchen and then enough bedrooms for your family, that's about all you need for a home.

A little manic was what their house ran on.

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

It wasnt until I was a sophomore in high school that I asked Mama if I could come into the kitchen and have her teach me how to cook something. Well, I wasnt in there five minutes before she said, OK, honey, you have to go now. I made her so nervous she was about ready to throw up. So I really didnt have an interest in being in the kitchen until after I was married, when I was 18. It didnt take me long to realize that Mama was not going to show up at my house every day and cook.

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Houses are like the human beings that inhabit them.

Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.

A house should look lived in, and I consider it clean as long as I don't stick to it and it doesn't give me cholera.

She thought to herself, "This is now." She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

Does the logic connect? What are the range of probably outcomes? You want to figure out what those probabilities are and ideally be the House. It's fine to gamble, as long as you're the House. Also, listen to critical feedback, particularly from friends. Generally they will be thinking it but they won't tell you.

As long as he has a house with two bathrooms. I swear to God, I don't care if he's Jack the Ripper.

Paul patted Mrs. O'Leary's snout. The living room shook —BOOM, BOOM, BOOM—which either meant a SWAT team was breaking down the door or Mrs. O'Leary was wagging her tail. I couldn't help but smile.

The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live with it.

Twenty-five years is a long time for a girl to live out of a trunk, and after looking over a few houses, I fell in love with one in Southwest Los Angeles.

Carlos, are we in complete understanding with each other?” “Yeah,” I say. “As long as it’s not in your house and you don’t know about it, you’re okay with us messin’ around.” “I know you’re joking with me. You are joking with me, aren’t you?” “Maybe.

I bought a house right before the housing crisis happened. So I paid too much and then I was stuck with it for a long time. So that was sad for me. I was like, "I'd better make a movie about this to get it out of my system."

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep