[b]Shirley Jackson
I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.[/b]
They do always say that honesty is the best policy.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality…
On the other hand, reality always has been, always is and always will be just what it it. Absolutely or not.
…you’d think my own face would know me…
On the other hand, he thought, why would it want to?
Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs, and when Brad said, What starts to happen? she said hysterically, People starting to come apart.
Margaret has seen too many movies.
Fear and guilt are sisters…
If not identical twins.
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.
Neurotically as it were. Or, in any event, as it certainly can be.