Ruth Franklin > Quotes

“Janna Malamud Smith, who grew up with the Hyman children during the years her father, Bernard Malamud, taught at Bennington College, writes chillingly in her memoir that the teenaged Sarah Hyman once told her—“explaining to me a view she attributed to her father”—that there was no such thing as rape: “However adamant, female protest was simply foreplay. Women wanted to be forced, and ultimately their excitement made them receptive, no matter what their claim.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Even President Woodrow Wilson was a devotee: when asked in 1914 whether he would be reelected, Wilson replied, “The Ouija board says yes.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“But on some level writing was a form of witchcraft to Jackson—a way to transform everyday life into something rich and strange, something more than what it appeared to be.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“THIS IS YOUR WIFE,” THE CAPTION OF THE BELL TELEPHONE ad reads. Above it, five identical women’s heads are lined up in a row. One head wears a chef’s toque; the next, a nurse’s bonnet; another, a chauffeur’s cap; and so on. Thanks to the telephone, readers are told, “the pretty girl you married” can order groceries, call for a sick child’s medicine, find out what time to meet her husband’s train, and more. Behold the modern American housewife: five women neatly bundled into one.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“This is long and I will stop. But mostly, I am sad at the ways misogyny is embedded in the literary landscape like the roots of a tree, extending everywhere invisibly below the surface and too often breaking through.”
― Ruth Franklin

“to do so. Some of our own deepest convictions may be as false. We might say that we have far more to be afraid of today than the people of Salem ever dreamed of, but that would not really be true. We have exactly the same thing to be afraid of—the demon in men’s minds which prompts hatred and anger and fear, an irrational demon which shows a different face to every generation, but never gives up in his fight to win over the world.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“And magic, to Jackson, was inextricably connected to her writing. “I like writing fiction better then anything, because just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words,”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“In all her writing, the recurrent theme was “an insistence on the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behavior.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“you were just going to slip off into the water?” asked victor.
“very softly,” i said.
“with no more than that?” asked victor.
“no more than that,” i said.
“tell me,” said victor, “why didn’t you die?”
“i forgot,” i said. “i went home and wrote a poem instead.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Anxiety fights dirty and dies hard.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“make myself healthier (thinner),”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Brendan Gill, who unkindly described Shirley as “a classic fat girl, with the fat girl’s air of clowning frivolity to mask no telling what depths of unexamined self-loathing,”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“The intelligent are in the minority, their measured voices in constant danger of being drowned out by the din of the mob. “We are not more tolerant or more valiant than the people of Salem, and we are just as willing to do battle with an imaginary enemy,” she wrote resignedly. “The people of Salem hanged and tortured their neighbors from a deep conviction that they were right”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Jackson expressed her frustration with magazine work, politics, the impending war, and all other annoyances of their life in New York in a single immortal couplet, verbosely titled "song for all editors, writers, theorists, political economists, idealists, communists, liberals, reactionaries, bruce bliven, marxist critics, reasoners, and postulators, any and all splinter groups, my father, religious fanatics, political fanatics, men on the street, fascists, ernest hemingway, all army members and advocates of military training, not excepting those too old to fight, the r.o.t.c. and the boy scouts, walter winchell, the terror organizations, vigilantes, all senate committees, and my husband":
i would not drop dead from the lack of you—
my cat has more brains than the pack of you.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“i’m not made to be free, and have different people always trying to tie me down,” Paul tells Anthony in one version of the scene in which he announces he will marry Mary, which Jackson rewrote half a dozen times. “i’m going to make myself an average, normal, married man, with children, and a home, and mary, and then i’ll hide my head in the haystack of the usual—” Anthony cuts in: “and try to pretend you’re happy.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life