Sunday Sentence: Shirley Jackson

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read last week, presented without context. Except in this case, to add that this is from a previously unpublished story by Shirley Jackson discovered among her papers at the Library of Congress and published in the Winter Reading issue of Tin House (Vol. 15, No. 2).

It's like everyone back home, she was thinking, picnics and last-minute invitations, and everything confused and grimy and noisy, taking people away from their homes and their dinners without ever stopping to think how inconvenient it might be for the orderly routine of their houses. Mrs. Spencer remembered, with a little shiver of fury, the troops of laughing friends her sister was always apt to bring home, always, somehow, when the house was freshly cleaned and things put in order.

-- Shirley Jackson, Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons