Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
Imagine, always pretending to run a world. Always imitating the sort of people they think they might be if the world were the sort of world it isn’t. Pretending to be words like ‘normal’ and ‘wholesome’ and ‘honest’ and ‘decent’ and ‘self-respecting’ and all the rest, when even the words aren’t real. Imagine, being people.
Brandy, anyone? My passion for spirits – ” “No.” Theodora giggled wildly. “Not that pun,” she said.
No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.
She also depicted the cruel jokes of fate and chance unfolding in an amoral universe. It’s just that instead of doing it with men and guns, she chose to write about mad, lonely girls and big, sinister houses.
You know,” Theodora said slowly, “up until the last minute – when I got to the gates, I guess – I never really thought there would be a Hill House. You don’t go around expecting things like this to happen.” “But some of us go around hoping,” Eleanor said.
Don’t be hypnotized by the sanctity of the superficial rhythm of humdrum life, Jackson warns, for under the surface of things, people change, sometimes irrevocably, and yet they may appear unaltered.
There’s only one of me, and it’s all I’ve got.
Her eyes hurt with tears against the screaming blackness of the path and the shuddering whiteness of the trees, and she thought, with a clear intelligent picture of the words in her mind, burning, Now I am really afraid.
Ghosts are real, this much I know. There are things that tie them to a place, very much like they do us. Some remain tethered to a patch of land, a time and date, the spilling of blood, a terrible crime. But there are others... others that hold on to an emotion, a drive, loss, revenge, or love. Those... they never go away.
It was going to happen sooner or later, in any case,” Eleanor said. “But of course no matter when it happened it was going to be my fault.
The weather falls more gently on some places than on others, the world looks down more paternally on some people. Some spots are proverbially warm, and keep, through falling snow, their untarnished reputations as summer resorts; some people are automatically above suspicion.
Because Helen Clarke was ungraceful by nature, she managed to make the simple act of moving into a room and sitting down a complex ballet for three people; before Constance had quite finished speaking Helen Clarke jostled Mrs. Wright and sent Mrs. Wright sideways like a careening croquet ball off into the far corner of the room where she sat abruptly and clearly without intention upon a small and uncomfortable chair.
I dusted the wedding-cake trim with a cloth on the end of a broom, staggering, and looking up and pretending that the ceiling was the floor and I was sweeping, hovering busily in space looking down at my broom, weightless and flying until the room swung dizzily and I was again on the floor looking up.
She knew, of course, that he was delighting in exceeding his authority, as though once he moved to unlock the gate he would lose the little temporary superiority he thought he had.
I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Everything is worse,” he said, looking at Eleanor, “if you think something is looking at you.
We never know where our courage is coming from.
I’m sure I’ve been here before,” Eleanor said. “In a book of fairy tales, perhaps.
The road to hell is very likely paved with my notes for stories and books and articles.