"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead."
— Shirley Jackson (We Have Always Lived in the Castle)

"I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin..."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. 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."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

"Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

"We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame."
— Shirley Jackson (We Have Always Lived in the Castle)

"Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, and Bess, they all went together to find a bird's nest..."
— Shirley Jackson (The Bird's Nest)

"He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

"Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

"Say Morg--you mind if I use the rest of your bath salts? There's only a little left."
— Shirley Jackson (The Bird's Nest)

"We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved."
— Shirley Jackson (We Have Always Lived in the Castle)

"Oh Constance, we are so happy."
— Shirley Jackson (We Have Always Lived in the Castle)