Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

I am a person not gifted with great emotions and consequently, while I can never be sentimental, I can never be great.”

Mrs. Waite, too long accustomed to seeing her most heartfelt emotions exposed, discussed, and ignored, had long since fallen into protecting herself by stating them as jokes, with an air of girlish whimsy which irritated both Natalie and Mr. Waite as no flat statement of hatred could have.

Any kind of positive statement was so much an invasion of his own privacy

Natalie stood in the doorway between the hall and the living room, thinking, This is a party and I’m here already and I must remember that my name is Natalie.

I think I’ll make things be nice, and make him behave, and just make everything all happy and exciting again the way it used to be—but I’m too tired.”

“First they tell you lies,” said Mrs. Waite, “and they make you believe them. Then they give you a little of what they promised, just a little, enough to keep you thinking you’ve got your hands on it. Then you find out that you’re tricked, just like everyone else, just like everyone, and instead of being different and powerful and giving the orders, you’ve been tricked just like everyone else and then you begin to know what happens to everyone and how they all get tricked. Everyone only knows one ‘I,’ and that’s the ‘I’ they call themselves, and there’s no one else can be ‘I’ to anyone except that one person, and they’re all stuck with themselves and once they find out they’ve been tricked, then they’ve been tricked and maybe the worst of it is that it isn’t like anything else; you can’t just say, ‘I’ve been tricked and I’ll make the best of it,’ because you never believe it because they let you see just enough about the next time to keep you hoping that maybe you’re a little bit smarter and a little bit . . .”

Now all of a sudden I find that I am walking around in a world very full of other people, and because they are all frightened too I can afford to be frightened, and then once I know I am frightened then I can go ahead and forget about it and start looking around at other things.

“‘No one understands that I only want everyone to love me.’”

It has always been my opinion, you know, that 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.

perhaps you feel that you are doing badly these days because you do not perceive that you are, in fact, doing very well indeed, and only lack the perception of your own worth to know exactly how well.

“I used to think,” Natalie said, “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.”