The Road Through the Wall Quotes

“Miss Fielding had no fears of ultimate survival, even in beauty. When she passed on, she would draw after her every trailing mist of herself, effacing herself so completely that even after her death, even after her bones, which she could not help, were gone, she would be a bother to no one, would intrude on no mind.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“It was probable that everyone on Pepper Street knew that Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were, oddly, friends, but it is certain that no one was particularly interested in it. Both Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were so exactly the sort of people who want to hide, that the neighborhood was only thankful to have them hiding together, instead of intruding their modesty on busier people.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“The weather falls more gently on some places than on others, the world looks down more paternally on some people. Some spots are proverbially warm, and keep, through falling snow, their untarnished reputations as summer resorts; some people are automatically above suspicion.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“We must expect to set a standard,” her mother said. It was perhaps the third time she had said it, and it registered muddily on Harriet’s mind. “We must expect to set a standard. Actually, however much we may want to find new friends whom we may value, people who are exciting to us because of new ideas, or because they are different, we have to do what is expected of us.”

“What is expected of me?” Harriet said suddenly, without intention.

“To do what you’re told,” her mother said sharply.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Outside were the eucalyptus trees, like lace against the sky. If it were only possible to lie against them, light and bodiless, sink into their softness, deeper and deeper, lost in them, buried, never come back again....”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“You're lucky you won't ever be pretty."

Harriet knew already that this would keep her heartsick for months, perhaps the rest of her life, and she said thickly, "I'm losing weight right now."

"It isn't that you're so fat," Miss Tyler said critically. "You just don't have the air of a pretty woman. All your life, for instance, you'll walk like you're fat, whether you are or not.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition. He even hated the round table and the succession of tablecloths, one pale blue with yellow leaves, one white with red and orange squares. He hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Tod Donald rarely did anything voluntarily, or with planning, or even with intent acknowledged to himself; he found himself doing one thing, and then he found himself doing another, and that, as he saw it, was the way one lived along, never deciding, never helping.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Hester was silent. Somehow, as she sat on the curb with the children around her and Mr. Desmond sauntering up the block on his evening walk and Mrs. Roberts on her front porch, it came to Hester that the evening was focusing on her; tomorrow night she would not be here, last night she had not been allowed to play, and in years, wherever she was, whatever she was doing to keep alive, these children would still be quietly growing, protected and sheltered with the strong houses of their parents and the quiet assumption that streets were made for them to sit on.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Outside were the eucalyptus trees, like lace against the sky. If it were only possible to lie against them, light and bodiless, sink into their softness, deeper and deeper, lost in them, buried, never come back again….”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Some lives, ending as Miss Fielding's would, leave a grain of memory, like a grain of sand, in the depths of another mind, a grain of sand which is like the constant irritation under an oyster's shell, eventually to grow with coating after coating of disguising beauty into a pearl. Sometime this memory would be pried loose, in its rounded beauty, to stand by itself as an object of delight.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Miss Fielding was old, and sensed constantly, rather than knew sometimes with sharp clarity, the decay of her body around her, the gradual easing of tensions that had once been vital. Miss Fielding was interested in anything for a little while, would rise from her chair to watch a cat crossing the road, but after the little while was over, Miss Fielding, in her chair, went back to searching the face of death.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Life on Pepper Street was peaceful and easy because its responsibilities lay elsewhere; its very paving had been laid down by men now far away, planned by someone in an office building even Mr. Desmond had not seen. Like those who live directly in contact with the ground, like the people who had, more or less long ago, been ancestors to everyone on Pepper Street, their lives were quietly governed for them by a mysterious faraway force. The sky, which was close but uncontrollable, had been an immediate power to the forefathers of Mr. Desmond or Mr. Byrne, as had the wind or the earthworm, which might or might not belong to them, and then, finally, the other unseen governors: the prices in a distant town, regulated by minds and hungers in a town even farther away, all the possessions which depended on someone in another place, someone who controlled words and paper and ink, who could by the changing of a word on paper influence the very texture of the ground.

On Pepper Street, inhabited by descendants of farmers, people were accustomed to thinking of themselves as owners, but even the very chair on which Mr. Desmond sat in the evenings belonged to him only on sufferance; it had belonged first to someone who made it, in turn governed by someone who planned it, and Mr. Desmond, although he did not know it, had chosen it because it had been presented to him as completely choosable. He might have taken one of several others, differing in style or color, he might have done without a chair, but ultimately the one chair he bought was completely controlled because Mr. Desmond wanted a chair, and if he wanted a chair, had to buy one, and if he were going to buy one, had to buy one that existed, and if it existed at all ... and so on.

It was on the same principle that Mr. Desmond had a house, that he has a street in front of his house. Mr. Desmond would not have bought or built a house in a site where it was impossible to have electricity, but then someone he did not know had declared that electricity was possible in the first place. Mr. Desmond lived on the patience of all the people who did not kill him. He ate what foods he was allowed to buy. He regarded himself as an owner, as a taxpayer, as a responsible citizen, and so did Mr. Byrne and Mr. Roberts and Mr. Perlman and Mr. Ransom-Jones, and they sent their children to schools dictated and run by people they had never seen, and they slept at night between sheets made by hands they would never shake. They had nothing to say about how soon their houses would begin to rot, when the sheets might tear.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall