Quote #14

Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.

More from Shirley Jackson

  1. No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac jux…
  2. This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitt…
  3. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some,…
  4. Curiously, there are three main themes which dominate the letters of that first summer--three themes which might be identified as bewilderm…
  5. 'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
  6. I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.
  7. Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.
  8. I delight in what I fear.

All Shirley Jackson quotes