We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle | Quotes 1. "A pretty sight, a lady with a book." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 2. "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 3. "On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 4. "I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 5. "I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 6. "I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 7. "Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 8. "We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 9. "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 10. "All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 11. "I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 12. "I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 13. "I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 14. "Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 15. "You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?" - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 16. "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." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 17. "On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 18. "I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.' 'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 19. "We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 20. "I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four," he said, patting his hands together. "I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie. Constance, my dear?" "Yes, Uncle Julian?" "I am going to say that my wife was a beautiful woman." - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 21. "Oh Constance, we are so happy." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 22. "Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon, we will eat rose petals." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 23. "We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 24. "I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 25. "I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes–-the left–-saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night. If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 26. "Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!" Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 27. "Wear your boots if you wander today" Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 28. "When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 29. "The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this," and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened. There was no change coming, I thought here, only spring; I was wrong to be so frightened. The days would get warmer, and Uncle Julian would sit in the sun, and Constance would laugh when she worked in the garden, and it would always be the same. Jonas went on and on ("And then we sang! And then we sang!") and the leaves moved overhead and it would always be the same." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 30. "Can't you make them stop?' I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 31. "Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me. Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!" Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 32. "What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight, a lady with a book." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 33. "And we held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky. 'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.' 'I told you that you would like it on the moon." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 34. "All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 35. "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." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 36. "Don't touch my papers," Uncle Julian said, trying to cover them with his hands. "You get away from my papers, you bastard." "What!?" said Charles. "I apologize," Uncle Julian said to Constance. "Not language fitting for your ears, my dear. Just tell this young bastard to stay away from my papers." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 37. "When we had neatened the upstairs rooms we came downstairs together, carrying our dust cloths and the broom and dustpan and mop like a pair of witches walking home." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 38. "I disliked having a fork pointed at me and I disliked the sound of the voice never stopping; I wished he would put food on the fork and put it into his mouth and strangle himself." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 39. "I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground, I could walk over him stamping my feet." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 40. "The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 41. "I played a game when I did the shopping. I thought about the children's games where the board is marked into little spaces and each player moves according to a throw of the dice; there were always dangers, like "lose one turn" and "go back four spaces" and "return to start," and little helps, like "advance three spaces" and "take an extra turn." The library was my start and the black rock was my goal. I had to move down one side of Main Street, cross, and then move up the other side until I reached the black rock, when I would win." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 42. "I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. 'Here is a treasure for you to bury,' Constance used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon; I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday, they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 43. "It was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 44. "I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 45. "... I never turned; it was enough to feel them all there without looking into their flat grey faces with hating eyes. I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, "Never let them see that you care," and "If you pay attention, they'll only get worse," and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. 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." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 46. "The least Charles could have done,' Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 47. "The rain started while we sat in the kitchen, and we left the kitchen door open so we could watch the rain slanting past the doorway and washing the garden; Constance was pleased, the way any good gardener is pleased with rain." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 48. "That was Mrs. Donell, speaking clearly from somewhere behind me, and someone giggled and someone else said Shh. I never turned; it was enough to feel them all there in back of me without looking into their flat grey faces with the hating eyes. I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, never let them see that you care, and If you pay any attention they’ll only get worse, and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. 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 and dying. I would then 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. It’s wrong to hate them, Constance said, it only weakens YOU, but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 49. "I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 50. "Eliminating Charles from everything he had touched was almost impossible, but it seemed to me that if I altered our father's room, and perhaps later the kitchen and the drawing room and the study, and even finally the garden, Charles would be lost, shut off from what he recognized, and would have to concede that this was not the house he had come to visit and so would go away." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 51. "I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 52. "I would not forget my magic words; they were MELODY GLOUCESTER PEGASUS, but I refused to let them into my mind." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 53. "I had made sure of what to say to him before I came to the table. 'The Amanita phalloides,' I said to him, 'holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting--" Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 54. "It was important to choose the exact device to drive Charles away. An imperfect magic, or one incorrectly used, might only bring more disaster upon our house. I thought of my mother's jewels, since this was a day of sparkling things, but they might not be strong on a dull day, and Constance would be angry if I took them out of the box where they belonged, when she herself had decided against it. I thought of books, which are always strongly protective, but my father's book had fallen from the tree and let Charles in; books, then, were perhaps powerless against Charles. I lay back against the tree trunk and thought of magic; if Charles had not gone away before three days, I would smash the mirror in the hall." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 55. "I was thinking of Charles. I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. I could bury him in the hole where my box silver dollars had been so safe until he came; if he was under the ground, I could walk all over him stamping my feet. He had not even bothered to fill in the hole. I could imagine him walking here and noticing the spot where the ground was disturbed, stopping to poke in it and then digging wildly with both his hands, scowling and finally greedy and shocked and gasping when he found my box of silver dollars. 'Don't blame me,' I said to the hole; I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 56. "The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: 'My mother, who was the first cat, told me this,' and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 57. "I would not touch the ring; the thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of, but I liked the watch chain, which twisted and wound around my hand when I picked it up." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 58. "Bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 59. "Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 60. "That must have been just about the minute he found the entrance and started up the driveway, hurrying in the rain, because I had only a minute or two left before I saw him. I might have used that minute or two for so many things: I might have warned Constance, somehow, or I might have thought of a new, safer, magic word, or I might have pushed the table across the kitchen doorway; as it happened, I played with my spoon, and looked at Jonas, and when Constance shivered, I said, 'I'll get your sweater for you." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 61. "When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry. Besides, each time he repeated himself he thought it was funnier; I knew he might go on like this until he was really sure that no one was listening any more, and I made a rule for myself: Never think anything more than once, and I put my hands quietly in my lap." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 62. "I thought that Uncle Julian was probably really very happy, with both Constance and Aunt Dorothy to take care of him, and I told myself that long thin things would remind me to be kinder to Uncle Julian; this was to be a day of long thin things, since there had already been a hair in my toothbrush, and a fragment of a string was caught on the side of my chair and I could see a splinter broken off the back step." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 63. "Good morning, Jonas. You are a furred lead, I think." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 64. "That was when I left her and went outside to talk to Charles. I knew I would dislike talking to Charles, but it was almost too late to ask him politely and I thought I should ask him once. Even the garden had become a strange landscape with Charles' figure in it; I could see him standing under the apple trees and the trees were crooked and shortened beside him. I came out the kitchen door and walked slowly toward him. I was trying to think charitably of him, since I would never be able to speak kindly until I did, but whenever I thought of his big white face grinning at me across the table or watching me whenever I moved, I wanted to beat at him until he went away, I wanted to stamp on him after he was dead, and see him lying dead on the grass. So, I made my mind charitable toward Charles and came up to him slowly." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 65. "Perhaps the village was really a great game board, with the squares neatly marked out, and I had been moved past the square which read Fire; return to Start, and was now on the last few squares, with only one move to go to reach home." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 66. "Perhaps the village was really a great game board, with the squares neatly marked out, and I had been moved past the square which read 'Fire; return to Start,' and was now on the last few squares, with only one move to go to reach home." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 67. "We relied upon Constance for various small delicacies which only she could provide; I am of course not referring to arsenic.' 'Well, the blackberries were the most important part.' Mrs. Wright sounded a little hoarse." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 68. "Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and in her art (an early dust-flap biography called her a practicing amateur witch, and" Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 69. "She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like" Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 70. "Some of the people in the village had real faces that I knew and could hate individually; Jim" Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 71. "When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry. Besides," Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 72. "Therefore, it was not pride that took me into the village twice a week, or even stubbornness, but only the simple need for books and food." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 73. "If I am spared, he always said to Constance, I will write the book myself. If not, see that my notes are entrusted to some worthy cynic who will not be too concerned with the truth." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 74. "What was wrong with Mrs. Blackwood doing her own cooking" "Please" (...) "I personally preferred the arsenic"." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 75. "Although she shook her head." a. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 76. "(an early dust-flap biography called her a practicing amateur witch," Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle 77. "I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so as long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come." Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle