Shirley Jackson

“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

“I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work.”

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

“Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns.”

“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are.”

“The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it.”

“I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.”

“Material possessions, practical matters, mundane concerns—what are they to me? They are all much too solid for my taste.”

“Fear and guilt are sisters.”

“I am the only one of me. It's a terrible responsibility.”

“I delight in what I fear.”

“Journeys end in lovers meeting.”

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”

“I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”