Shirley Jackson House Quotations

Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else.

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.

Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.

There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.

It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.

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.