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We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson

Top 10 Best Quotes

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

“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.”

“I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.”

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

“I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”

“Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.”

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Book Keywords:

merricat, cats, death, food, afraid, fear, poison, strangers, hate

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