- from We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962) 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a novel that’s been following and haunting me ever since I first read it. It is included among these other great Halloween-relevant reading suggestions from James Pate at Sublime Horror: “Mid-century horror, a reading list.” 

And here are a few more atmospheric quotes for the day. There’s this:

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

And this:

“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.”

And this:

I thought that 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.

- from We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962)

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