Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

warn you direfully against false friends. And against those for whose friendship toward you you can find no material motive. And against all fawners, all liars, all nodders. Believe me, girl, without a motive no friendship can be, and without a motive no friendship can last, and whether it be father to daughter or lover to wife, no friendship can come to birth without it have a motive and an end in view.*

do not trust entirely to your own knowledge for these things. One person inaccurate upon his own behavior may nevertheless be accurate upon yours. Consult, therefore, the blind and honest; they can do you no harm, and one, at least, wishes you none.

that without you I could not exist: there can be no father without a daughter. You have thus a double responsibility, for my existence and your own. If you abandon me, you lose yourself.

it had suddenly come to Natalie that when people were sober they repudiated everything they had done when they were drunk, and when they were drunk they repudiated everything they had done when they were sober.

“Anne is a bitch and I used to be a bitch and now I’m not any more.”

princesses are confined in towers only because they choose to stay confined, and the only dragon required to keep them there was their own desire to be kept. And I further believe, now, that if you erect a tower, princesses will flock to it demanding to be locked up therein.

screaming was in itself an act perfected by few, a sort of coloratura not given to the many;

If I were really very frightened, Natalie thought, following barefoot the naked figure ahead, I might yell, or shout, but never deliver a telling scream; then I am not really very frightened,

I could slip right away, Natalie thought. I could die here, with my eyes wide open and my mouth parted admiringly, and my glass poised in stunned admiration halfway to the chair arm; I could die right here.

perhaps she was not dreaming, not mad, but alive and sound—living in this caught second of life only in the musing mind of some salesgirl or waitress or prostitute or some drab creature to whom the life of a girl in college named Naitalie Wat seemed romantic;

It was this that made her write her name crazily on everything, knowing and yet forgetting that her books and her clothes and her written sheets of paper would be gone with Natalie Waite, were only part of a larger dream;

I should hate to deprive you prematurely of the glories of the suicidal frame of mind, since I am fairly certain that depriving yourself of the ability to feel this way would be more cruel than any sort of physical torture you might inflict upon yourself,

“No one likes me.” “I hardly blame them,”

No point in speaking, no reasonable thing to say. It had all been debated endlessly in the second between her mother’s drawn-in breath and Natalie’s involuntary movement that checked it. Her mother had almost said, “Natalie, are you happy?” and Natalie had almost said, “No”; her mother had almost said, “Everything seems somehow to go badly,” and Natalie had almost said, “I know it and I can’t help it”; her mother had almost said, “Let me help you,” and Natalie had almost said, “What can you do?”

in all her travels Natalie had not learned how to come to her mother in gratitude,

It seemed that perhaps her father was trying to cure his failures in Natalie, and her mother was perhaps trying to avoid, through Natalie, doing over again those things she now believed to have been mistaken.

then she turned and smiled at me. Now, knowing her for what she is, the most vividly talented actress (murderess? courtesan? dancer?) of our time or perhaps any time, I can see more clearly the enchanting contradictions within her—her humor, her vicious flashing temper, so easily aroused and so quickly controlled by her iron will; her world-weary cynicism

Natalie thought that she had never in her life lived through the month of May; it was a fable, a month non-existing, a month for maying and greenswarding, not an ordinary month full of weeks and days and probably Tuesdays and Sundays like any other month) was something that might or might not happen

Tony and Natalie believed that they were the only two people in the world who now loved Tarot cards, and used them—so reminiscent of antique, undreamed games—for

a kind of affectionate fortune-telling which was always faithful to the meanings of the cards as recorded in the Tarot book, but which somehow always came out as meaning that Tony and Natalie were the finest and luckiest persons imaginable.

Side by side, like two big cats, they slept.

In a strange country one must be extremely cautious;

“We could open a small bookstore. Only the books we like ourselves.”

“when I was a child, that I had only a limited stock of ‘yeses’ and ‘nos,’ and that when they were used up I couldn’t get any more and then I wouldn’t be able to answer most of the questions silly people asked me.”

“Imagine, always pretending to run a world. Always imitating the sort of people they think they might be if the world were the sort of world it isn’t. Pretending to be words like ‘normal’ and ‘wholesome’ and ‘honest’ and ‘decent’ and ‘self-respecting’ and all the rest, when even the words aren’t real. Imagine, being people.”

“They seem to think we’re weaker than we really are. I personally feel that I have talents for resistance they don’t even suspect.” “Perhaps,” said Tony dryly, “they have antagonists you have not yet encountered.”

“If I were inventing this world,” she said, “—and I may have, at that—I would gauge my opponents more accurately.

“Terrible things,” she said in a low voice to Natalie, as one communicating female facts not suitable for the ears of men. “Attackers and all that.”