Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life.
Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying, “Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor.
She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method – imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.
The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.
I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking.” She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,” she said, “was because if people didn’t say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn’t talk to each other at all.
The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.
Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine.
I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings.
Nothing,” she said, “upsets me more than being hungry; I snarl and snap and burst into tears.
In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much. Principally, I don’t understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.
I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it’s dull no-one should have to read it anyway, and if it’s interesting I should be using it for a story.
Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House. The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.
Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants die within its walls.
Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister’s shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society.
She wants her cup of stars.
I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.
I’d have to be pretty damn silly to think that people had rights to other people’s love; in my life I’ve earned more love and got less than anyone I know.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
I live a mad, abandoned life, draped in a shawl and going from garret to garret.