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All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…"

— Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

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More quotes by Shirley Jackson

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Harcraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1954)

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.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

The Lottery (1948)

Cocoa? Cocoa! Damn miserable puny stuff, fit for kittens and unwashed boys. Did Shakespeare drink cocoa?

The Bird's Nest (1954)

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

The Lottery (1948)

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All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away.

Mahavira

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.

Bertrand Russell Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948)

Histories are more full of Examples of the Fidelity of dogs than of Friends.

Alexander Pope

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Shirley Jackson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.