Ghosts Quotes

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Terror made me cruel...”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“You fuck - you ate my cat!”
― Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood

“I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“He was trying to tell me something."
Derek snorted. "Aren’t they all? Must be a rule in the ghost handbook—if in danger of evaporating, make sure you’re in the middle of a dire pronouncement.”
― Kelley Armstrong, The Reckoning

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood....”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

—address to the Society for Psychical Research in England”
― C.G. Jung

“The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.”
― Rob Montgomery

“Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.”
― Jim Carroll

“I need someone who can be invisible, who can become a ghost. Do you think you can do that?"

I'm already a ghost, she thought. I died in the hold of a slaver ship.
"i think so.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Oh, very good,' interrupted Snape, his lip curling. 'Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. 'Ghosts are transparent.”
― J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“I let out a laugh that sounded more like the yip of a startled poodle." Superp-powers? I wish. My powers aren't winning me a slot on the Cartoon Network anytime soon... except as a comic relief. Ghost Whisperer Junior. Or Ghost Screamer, more like it. Tune in, every week, as Chloe Saunders runs screaming from yet another ghost looking for her help. "
Okay, superpower might be pushing it.”
― Kelley Armstrong, The Summoning

“He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“Hazel frowned." Why that one? "

"You don't see the ghost?" Frank asked.

"Ghost?" Nico asked.

Okay... if Frank was seeing a ghost that the Underworld kids couldn't see, something was definitely wrong.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

“Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.

Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place.

Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror's least.

The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O'erlooking a superior spectre
More near.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“You begin to see things differently once you are dead.
Isaac Bonnyman”
― Frank Lambert, Xyz

“Did you know sometimes it frightens me--
when you say my name and I can't see you?
will you ever learn to materialize before you speak?
impetuous boy, if that's what you really are.
how many centuries since you've climbed a balcony
or do you do this every night with someone else?
you tell me that you'll never leave
and I am almost afraid to believe it.
why is it me you've chosen to follow?
did you like the way I look when I am sleeping?
was my hair more fun to tangle?
are my dreams more entertaining?
do you laugh when I'm complaining that I'm all alone?
where were you when I searched the sea
for a friend to talk to me?
in a year where will you be?
is it enough for you to steal into my mind
filling up my page with music written in my hand
you know I'll take the credit for I must have made you come to me somehow.
but please try to close the curtains when you leave at night,
or I'll have to find someone to stay and warm me.
will you always attend my midnight tea parties--
as long as I set it at your place?
if one day your sugar sits untouched
will you have gone forever?
would you miss me in a thousand years--
when you will dry another's tears?
but you say you'll never leave me
and I wonder if you'll have the decency
to pass through my wall to the next room
while I dress for dinner
but when I'm stuck in conversation
with stuffed shirts whose adoration
hurts my ears,
where are you then?
can't you cut in when I dance with other men?
it's too late not to interfere with my life
you've already made me a most unsuitable wife
for any man who wants to be the first his bride has slept with
and you can't just fly into people's bedrooms
then expect them to calmly wave goodbye
you've changed the course of history
and didn't even try
where are you now--
standing behind me,
taking my hand?
come and remind me
who you are
have you traveled far
are you made of stardust too
are the angels after you
tell me what I am to do
but until then I'll save your side of the bed
just come and sing me to sleep”
― Emilie Autumn

“When you go out hunting wicked spirits, it's the simple things that matter most. The silvered point of your rapier flashing in the dark; the iron filings scattered on the floor; the sealed canisters of best Greek Fire, ready as a last resort...

But tea bags, brown and fresh and plenty of them, and made (for preference) by Pitkin Brothers of Bond Street, are perhaps the simplest and best of all.

OK, they may not save your life like a sword-tip or an iron circle can, and they haven't the protective power of a sudden wall of fire. But they do provide something just as vital. They help keep you sane.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Screaming Staircase

“The ghosts of things that never happened are worse than the ghosts of things that did.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

“Staring at the wraith’s left hand, Zam saw a stump where its index finger should have been and knew then that the severed finger moving around in his pocket belonged to the wraith.”
― Frank Lambert, Xyz

“All right, you deadly little ghostlings,” I muttered. “Mama says go back tobed!- Cat”
― Jeaniene Frost, This Side of the Grave

“At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“Fucking nightmares.

My heart starts to slow down. Glancing down at the floor, I see Tybalt, who is glaring at me with a puffed-up tail. I wonder if he had been sleeping on my chest and I catapulted him off when I woke up. I don't remember, but I wish that I did, because it would've been hilarious.”
― Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood

“I assure you; while I look like a ghost, I'm no spirit or demon. I'm nothing but a girl struggling to make her way in an intolerant world. I bleed, I love, and someday, I'll die.”
― Leanna Renee Hieber, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker