“ ...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group Shirley Jackson
“ People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1) Shirley Jackson
“ Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you s… Shirley Jackson
“ Poor things, she thought - do they have to spend all this energy just to surround me? It seemed pitiful that these automatons should be created and wasted, never knowing more than a minor fragment of… Shirley Jackson
“ In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much. Principally, I don’t understand people outside; people in… Shirley Jackson
“ Mrs. Arnold," the doctor said, coming around the desk, "we're not going to help things any this way.""What is going to help?" Mrs. Arnold said. "Is everyone really crazy but me?""Mrs. Arnold," the doc… Shirley Jackson
“ No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, but some, to dream. Shirley Jackson
“ No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. Shirley Jackson
“ Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway. Shirley Jackson
“ Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books. Shirley Jackson
“ Tell me something that only I will ever know, was perhaps what she wanted to ask him, or, What will you remember me by? - or even, Nothing of the least importance has ever belonged to me; can you help… Shirley Jackson
“ 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
“ I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, st… Shirley Jackson
