Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.
Looking up as she did immediately, she saw immeasurable space, traveling past the locked hands of the trees, past the large nodding implacable heads, up and into the silence of the sky, where the stars remained, indifferent.
An Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends.
It’s all my fault, anyway.” That was her new way of thinking.
Around the house, my head deep in a pillowcase or the oven, my eyes focused on that supernatural neatness which the housewife sees somehow shadowing her familiar furniture, it was largely possible to disregard, or not-quite-hear, Sally, but in the car I was entirely what I believe is called a captive audience.
On the main street of one village she passed a vast house, pillared and walled, with shutters over the windows and a pair of stone lions guarding the steps, and she thought that perhaps she might live there, dusting the lions each morning and patting their heads good night.
When I was a child,” Theodora said lazily, “‘ – many years ago,’ Doctor, as you put it so tactfully – I was whipped for throwing a brick through a greenhouse roof. I remember I thought about if for a long time, remembering the whipping but remembering also the lovely crash, and after thinking about it very seriously I went out and did it again.
Don’t be so afraid all the time,” she said and reached out to touch Eleanor’s cheek with one finger. “We never know where our courage is coming from.
I think, for instance, that no one can really love a person who is not superior in every way.
I am home, she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.
Anything you raise by the way of spirits you have to put back yourself.
Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations – visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment.
The thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of.
The twins were loitering over their cereal, and Mrs. Walpole, with one eye on the clock and the other on the kitchen window past which the school bus would come in a matter of minutes, felt the unreasonable irritation that comes with being late on a school morning, the wading-through-molasses feeling of trying to hurry children.
In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.
No, she thought, you are not going to catch me so cheaply; I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings; this man is a parrot.
A man in Texas won a divorce from his wife because she tore out the last chapter of every mystery story he borrowed from the library.
I have no way of knowing what we may be called upon to do for ourselves.
She is hysterical,” said Mrs. Halloran. “Slap her quite firmly in the face.
But some of us go around hoping.