Shirley Jackson

"So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you."

"Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heart-breakingly mobile."

"I delight in what I fear."

"I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes."

"I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there."

"Name" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised."Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her."Age" she asked. "Sex? Occupation"Writer," I said."Housewife," she said."Writer," I said."I'll just put down housewife," she said."

"Everything is worse...if you think something is looking at you."

"It’s not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark."

"Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly. The educational institution is certainly no exception to this, although training the young is by implication an art for old people exclusively, and novelty in education is allied to mutiny. Moreover, the mere process of learning is allied to mutiny. Moreover, the mere process of learning is so excruciating and so bewildering that no conceivable phraseology or combination of philosophies can make it practical as a method of marking time during what might be called the formative years."

"Around the house, my head deep in a pillowcase or the oven, my eyes focused on that supernatural neatness which the housewife sees somehow shadowing her familiar furniture, it was largely possible to disregard, or not-quite-hear, Sally, but in the car I was entirely what I believe is called a captive audience."

"I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon."

"So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you."