Quotes About Ghosts

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!

Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us - that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions - they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate.

When I write, I speak with ghosts for years, and I see images that are a little bit out of focus. I see faces, but the faces change. At the moment that it's a real human being that's flesh and bone, it changes a character. It's much more precise and complex.

So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.

People can attach themselves to something--an idea, another person, a desire--with an impossibly strong grip, and in the case of restless ghosts, a grip stronger than death. Will is a powerful thing. Will--it's supposed to be a good treat, a more determined and persistent version of determination and persistence. But will and obsession--they sit right next to each other. They pretend to be strangers and all the while meet secretly at midnight." -

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

All cities are geological and three steps cannot be taken without encountering ghosts.

Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit.

I think there are ghosts. I haven't seen or heard anything. I've definitely felt something, but it's not scary.

I think in some way it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows.

Depression is like slashing at ghosts. Of course it's tempting to finally cut something real.

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

People like to think that actors are terribly worried about ghosts of other actors in the parts they play. But you just have to get on with it.

You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.

I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.

I'm inspired as a writer by any place where I've lived for a significant amount of time that have memories, my past, and stories attached to them, and that's really New York and L.A. Any place where there's ghosts are inspiring.

We are ghosts, hungry for something bigger than what our lips are kissing.

Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.

We are beginning to see practical support. And this is a very significant sign of the movement towards a new era, a new age.... We see both in our country and elsewhere... ghosts of the old thinking.... When we rid ourselves of their presence, we will be better able to move toward a new world order...relying on the relevent mechanisms of the United Nations.

She wished she were as inconsequential as the ghosts in her dreams.

Baseball is a game dominated by vital ghosts; it's a fraternity, like no other we have of the active and the no longer so, the living and the dead.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

...you don't need ghosts to be haunted. Memory does that just fine without any supernatural help at all.

His eyes were still like caves with ghosts dwelling in their depths.

Liza is in the tabloids almost as much as our mother was. She has struggled with her own ghosts and shadows.

I've always been attracted to the idea of ghosts being memories frozen in time, that a psychological haunting can be just as terrifying as a supernatural one.

I have to say my favorite stories are ghost stories. I don't like to see these made-up monster films or scary films with ghosts. It doesn't do anything to me. But a real ghost story that someone tells me, that I like.

It is a silent, shady place, with a paved courtyard so full of echoes, that sometimes I am tempted to believe that faint responses to the noises of old times linger there yet, and that these ghosts of sound haunt my footsteps as I pace it up and down.

Ghosts, like ladies, never speak till spoke to.

On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.

The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.

We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.

The Tao is in all things, in their divisions and their fullness. What I dislike about divisions is that they multiply, and what i dislike about multiplication is that it makes people want to hold fast to it. So people go out and forget to return, seeing little more than ghosts.

... but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame. I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

Ghosts don't haunt people--their memories do.