Everything is worse…if you think something is looking at you.

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,...

It’s not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive...

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them.

I delight in what I fear.

He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition....

My dear, how can I make you perceive that there is no danger where there is nothing but love and understanding?

I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I’m not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.

I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.

Poor things, she thought – do they have to spend all this energy just to surround me? It seemed pitiful that these automatons should be created and wasted, never knowing more than a minor fragment...

I’m going to put death in all their food and watch them die.

I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.

Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We’ll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there’ll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one...

Hill House, she thought, You’re as hard to get into as heaven.

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out...

Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly. The educational institution is certainly no exception to this, although training the young is by implication an art for old people exclusively, and...

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts.

People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.(“The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith” – Version 1)

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...

In the country of the story the writer is king.

She had never driven far alone before. The notion of dividing her lovely journey into miles and hours was silly; she saw it […] as a passage of moments, each one new, carrying her along...

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.

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this…

Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children….

Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, ‘She wants her cup of...

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.

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.

Fear,” the doctor said, “is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

…Don’t be surprised, and I say it darkly, do not be surprised if you lose your Luke in this cause; perhaps Mrs. Dudley has not yet had her own mid morning snack, and she is...

We believed optimistically that Laurie was a reformed character. I told my husband, on the last day of Laurie’s confinement, that actually one good scare like that could probably mark a child for life, and...