Shirley Jackson Quotes

“If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it, and why will not people explain and comfort? But instead—this pretense at calm satisfaction, where underneath there is all the seething restless desire to be off, away from all this anger at self and others, to where there are other conventions, other thoughts, other passions.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“I have never liked the theory that poltergeists only come into houses where there are children, because I think it is simply too much for any one house to have poltergeists and children. —“The Ghosts of Loiret”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Telling women’s stories was—and would always be—Jackson’s major fictional project. As she had in The Road Through the Wall and the stories of The Lottery, with Hangsaman Jackson continued to chronicle the lives of women whose behavior does not conform to society’s expectations. Neither an obedient daughter nor a docile wife-in-training, Natalie represents every girl who does not quite fit in, who refuses to play the role that has been predetermined for her—and the tragic psychic consequences she suffers as a result. During the postwar years, Betty Friedan would later write, the image of the American woman “suffered a schizophrenic split” between the feminine housewife and the career woman: “The new feminine morality story is . . . the heroine’s victory over Mephistopheles . . . the devil inside the heroine herself.” That is precisely what happens in Hangsaman. Unfortunately, it was a story that the American public, in the process of adjusting to the changing roles of women and the family in the wake of World War II, was not yet ready to countenance.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“The diary ends with a single repeated phrase: laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“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, so long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“insecure, uncontrolled, i wrote of neuroses and fear and i think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety,”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Constance and Merricat are indeed “two halves of the same person,” together forming one identity, just as a man and a woman are traditionally supposed to do in marriage. Not finding that wholeness in marriage, Jackson sought it elsewhere … Indeed, the novel, in its final version, is not about “two women murdering a man.” It is about two women who metaphorically murder male society and its expectations for them by insisting on living separate from it, governed only by themselves.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Brown, they would later write, had taught them that the goal of reading and criticizing was "to know and understand, not to like or dislike, and the aim of writing was to get down what you wanted to say, not to gesticulate or impress.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Every description is calculated for what it reveals, both about the character to whom it refers and the person whose attitude it represents ... As always in these descriptions, she has a knack for the unexpected word: tropical fish in a mural swim “insanely,” and the apple trees on Pepper Street produce “wry unpalatable fruit.” In “Notes for a Young Writer,” a lecture on writing fiction composed as advice to her daughter Sarah, Jackson would relish the “grotesque effect” of the “absolutely wrong word”: “ ‘I will always love you,’ he giggled.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Anne Sexton opened her poem “Housewife” (1962) with the line “Some women marry houses.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Jackson once said that “the first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents. . . . Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“The fear Jackson refers to is not fear of lesbianism—or, at least, not only fear of lesbianism. It is the fear of what lesbianism represented to her, something that on one level she fervently desired even as she feared it: a life undefined by marriage, on her own terms. Constance and Merricat are indeed “two halves of the same person,” together forming one identity, just as a man and a woman are traditionally supposed to do in marriage. Not finding that wholeness in marriage, Jackson sought it elsewhere: first with Jeanne Beatty, and later with her friend Barbara Karmiller, also younger, who came back into her life shortly after she finished Castle. Indeed, the novel, in its final version, is not about “two women murdering a man.” It is about two women who metaphorically murder male society and its expectations for them by insisting on living separate from it, governed only by themselves.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Jackson described her technique of zeroing in on a few specific words that take on a special significance in the context of each novel. Merricat’s symbolic words, “safe” and “clean,” pinpoint her singular focus: keeping the private world of the Blackwood estate free from intruders and perfectly in order (according to her own irrational logic).”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Janna Malamud Smith, who grew up with the Hyman children during the years her father, Bernard Malamud, taught at Bennington College, writes chillingly in her memoir that the teenaged Sarah Hyman once told her—“explaining to me a view she attributed to her father”—that there was no such thing as rape: “However adamant, female protest was simply foreplay. Women wanted to be forced, and ultimately their excitement made them receptive, no matter what their claim.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“a woman was technically supposed to either be married or have a health reason for requiring the device, but the rules were not always strictly enforced. “All you need is a straight face, a quick story, and a consciousness that . . . dammit, you can do it,” Shirley counseled a friend.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Past the turn I might find a mark of Constance’s foot, because she sometimes came that far to wait for me, but most of Constance’s prints were in the garden and in the house. Today she had come to the end of the garden, and I saw her as soon as I came around the turn; she was standing with the house behind her, in the sunlight, and I ran to meet her. “Merricat,” she said, smiling at me, “look how far I came today.” —We Have Always Lived in the Castle”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Moaning about how his own brilliance disadvantaged him was not a recipe for popularity. Stanley was initially as isolated in high school as Shirley would be in Rochester: “miserably lonely, reading prodigiously, hating everyone, and wishing I had enough courage to talk to girls.” One day a boy he recognized from class sat down next to him in the locker room. Stanley, trying to make conversation as he best knew how, asked his classmate if he read Poe. “No, I read very well, thank you,” came the reply. Stanley responded huffily that he didn’t think puns were very clever. “I don’t either,” said the other boy, “but they’re something I can’t help, like a harelip.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“No particular event appears to have sent her into this downward spiral. More likely, Jackson was overwhelmed—for the first time, but hardly the last—by the constellation of social anxiety and familial pressure that left her feeling accepted by no one.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“in one hour we counted one hundred people passing and found seven interesting faces,”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“she introduced me to a man who didn’t laugh at me because i was ugly and i fell in love with him and tried to kill myself but i was happy just the same.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Wrote a play tonight which delights me—it is so myself!”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“tell me,” said victor, “why didn’t you die?” “i forgot,” i said. “i went home and wrote a poem instead.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“More than once,” Norris writes in her memoir, “I received an engraved invitation to an on-campus orgy; a more perfect expression of debutante wantonness could not be conceived.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“More problematic was Stanley’s persistent interest in other women, which he saw no reason to hide. Dowson’s poem about a man who confesses infidelity even as he pines for his lost love—“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion!”—became their personal shorthand. (“My fashion has been acting up again,” Stanley would sometimes say, addressing Shirley as “Cynara,” after he had been out with another woman.)”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“By the end of the first semester, what I wanted to do most in the world was invite a few of my husband’s students over for tea and drop them down the well.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“If Shirley Jackson’s intent was to symbolize into complete mystification, and at the same time be gratuitously disagreeable, she certainly succeeded.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“When gold was first discovered at Sutter’s Mill, back in 1848, San Francisco, still in its infancy, was barely settled. New arrivals lived in canvas tents—poor shelter from the rainy weather. The city’s first buildings were made from ships run aground in the harbor. In 1849, the population was estimated at two thousand men and almost no women.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“All the old New England houses are the kind of square, classical type which wouldn’t be haunted in a million years.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Even President Woodrow Wilson was a devotee: when asked in 1914 whether he would be reelected, Wilson replied, “The Ouija board says yes.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate.”
― Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life