Life Among the Savages Quotes

“I took my coffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman's page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Sister's gone to school," I said to Sally.
"Ah," said Sally. "And will she come home again?”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Our house is old, and noisy, and full. when we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children....”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Sally at this time gave up any notion of being a co-operative member of a family, named herself "Tiger" and settled down to an unceasing, and seemingly endless, war against clothes, toothbrushes, all green vegetables, and bed.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Mr. Andrews never says “money,” just like that, the way the rest of us do so often; he refers to it reverently as “Credit” or “Funds” or “Equity.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Jannie can be the new mother,” Sally said largely, “and Mommy and I will just be the babies and Laurie is the queen and Daddy is a herd of rabbits.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Once,” Jannie remarked exclusively to Sally, “I had a friend named Susan, and Susan went to the horse racing and she betted on a horse named Susan, and the horse fell through the side of the track and all the horses went to see if he was all right and he had broken the gate and all the men got away and the horses couldn’t catch them to bring them back.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“I turned off the coffee, gave Sally her bottle—she is learning to drink her milk from a cup, but insists also upon having her bottle, full, for no better apparent reason than as a weapon with which to brain anyone foolish enough to bring a head near her—and began to break eggs into a bowl.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“demitasse,”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“No one seemed actually to go or come that morning; I would open my eyes and they were there, open my eyes again and they were gone.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“I had no desire to eat, or in fact to do anything which might upset my precarious balance between two and three children,”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“One of the most unnerving, and least original, observations I have made about my children is that as these years turn and Christmas inevitably follows the fourth of July and the fourth of July inevitably follows Christmas, they tend to grow older.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Sentimental people keep insisting that women go on to have a third baby because they love babies, and cynical people seem to maintain that a woman with two healthy, active children around the house will do anything for ten quiet days in the hospital.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

“Why," I said treacherously, "first thing you know, you'll be having a wonderful time in school. You've just forgotten what school is like."
"No, we haven't," Robert said.
"I used to love school," I said.
This was a falsehood so patent that none of them felt it necessary to answer me, even in courtesy.”
― Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages