GHOST QUOTES
quotations about ghosts
It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
The Hour of the Dragon
Apparitions are often confused with hauntings. The difference is that apparitions are "live" (intelligent consciousness) and hauntings are "recordings."
LOYD AUERBACH
interview
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The Satanic Verses
One need not be a chamber to be haunted.
EMILY DICKINSON
"One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted"
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.
SUE GRAFTON
M is for Malice
Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Heavenly Fire
When I see ghosts they look perfectly real and solid -- like a living human being. They are not misty; I can’t see through them; they don’t wear sheets or bloody mummy bandages. They don’t have their heads tucked under their arms. They just look like ordinary people, in living color, and sometimes it is hard to tell who is a ghost.
CHRIS WOODYARD
interview, Invisible Ink
Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
2001: A Space Odyssey
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Come home, come home, you million ghosts,
The honest years shall make amends,
The sun and moon shall be your hosts,
The everlasting hills your friends.
STELLA BENSON
Twenty
The city man is not in sympathy with ghosts. Not so the mountaineer, peasant and sailor. Strange shapes which give signs are seen in clouds. Dim forms move over forest floors. They tread lightly along the brink of precipice and marsh, beckon the traveler into perils or give him warning. Dark and airy figures walk moors and plains or lonely shores. They go again through some happening on land; they re-enact a fateful drama of the seas. The man of the city unaccustomed to such ghost tales, laughs at them; he knows they cannot be true. Yet disbelief and ridicule by many such, have given place to firm conviction and awe, after visiting haunts where environment favors the appearance of ghosts.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite
In the church-way paths to glide.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The ghosts you chase you never catch.
JOHN MALKOVICH
London Independent, Apr. 5, 1992
There are an infinite number of universes existing side by side and through which our consciousnesses constantly pass. In these universes, all possibilities exist. You are alive in some, long dead in others, and never existed in still others. Many of our "ghosts" could indeed be visions of people going about their business in a parallel universe or another time -- or both.
PAUL F. ENO
Faces at the Window
The lawn
Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return
Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,
The sad intangible who grieve and yearn....
T.S. ELIOT
To Walter de la Mare
The ghostly realm can be just as real as our physical one; the spectres are often quite ordinary people, living their busy lives alongside our own. They are like neighbours we are aware of, catching glimpses of them from time to time, hearing the odd sound from their part of the house, finding evidence they have just gone on ahead of us, slammed the gate and dashed off on their all-absorbing errands.
PAUL GATER
The Secret Lives of Ghosts
The ghosts of the tribe
Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire, they try to
Remember the sunlight,
Light has died out of their skies.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
Apology for Bad Dreams
Ghosts are not necessarily seen. They can be sensed by "atmosphere", heard in phantom cries for help, screams, muffled conversations, laughter, footsteps, the playing of nostalgic music; they can alarm us by passing close on their galloping horses, terrify us when we wander into the thunderous cannon-roar and blast of conflict. We may catch their scent or smell--from the grossly pungent to the sweetness of summer flowers. Some departed spirits make contact in dreams; or appear to family members or close friends when on the point of death, struggling to reasure those they love in a final farewell.
PAUL GATER
The Secret Lives of Ghosts
I look for ghosts; but none will force
Their way to me. 'Tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Between the living and the dead.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Affliction of Margaret
What are these,
So wither'd, and so wild in their attire;
That look not like the inhabitants o' th' earth,
And yet are on 't?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth