I thought we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale.
Flowers under glass,” Luke said. “Tassels. I am beginning to fancy this house.
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.
There is no danger where there is nothing but love and sympathetic understanding.
God God,” Eleanor said, flinging herself out of bed and across the room to stand shuddering in a corner, “God God – whose hand was I holding?
No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself.
Am I the public conscience? Expected always to say in cold words what the rest of them are too arrogant to recognise?
Good morning – through in a minute – I’ll leave the tub filled for you.
When Luke and I are called outside, and you two are kept imprisoned inside – doesn’t it begin to seem – and his voice is very quiet – doesn’t it begin to seem that the intention is, somehow, to separate us?
It was not possible to communicate with her because she would not abandon her coffee cup.
Mary Katherine must never be punished. Must never be sent to bed without her dinner. Mary Katherine will never allow herself to do anything inviting punishment.
When Jannie came home from school that afternoon she said that her teacher had put it into the class news that Jannie’s mommy and daddy were going to get a new house and Jannie would walk to school instead of taking the bus.
We had three more attics, but one of them was full of old lumber and bricks left over from the various additions that had been built onto the house, and one of them was full of bats, and the last could only be reached by climbing through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the next-to-the-last attic and even if I could get past the bats and through the lumber and bricks I did not think I could keep taking the baby up and down through a trapdoor.
We have got to get a bigger house,” I said. “Don’t be silly,” my husband said, reading. “There is no bigger house.” “A new house?” said Jannie. “Can I have a room of my own?” When I went down to the grocery the next morning the grocer said he heard we were thinking of moving.
When Mrs. Ferrier stepped inside our front door at one minute before three that afternoon it was perfectly clear to me without hesitation that we were not going to become fast friends.
Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly.
She had done so much to preserve herself from this kind of captivity and had taken inevitably one of the many roads which would lead her to the same torment; she was helpless among people who hated her and showed it by holding her motionless until they should choose to release her.
If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented.
All the millions of things we possessed as a family were inside the house, but, inexorably, there came one shocking moment when we discovered that the house was full.
I never yet knew anyone who could not fall asleep with Richardson being read aloud to him.