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Quotes About Ghosts

The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.
~ Dan Simmons
No one has made the art by which one makes the works of art. Each one who speaks speaks as a convocation. We live as councils of ghosts. It is not human genius that makes us human, but an old love, an old intelligence of the heart we gather to us from the world, from the creatures, from the angels of inspiration, from the dead-- an intelligence merely nonexistent to those who do not have it, but -- to those who have it more dear than life.
~ Wendell Berry
Ah, Mr Compson said, Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?
~ William Faulkner
The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father's evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more fascinating than frightening.
~ William Gibson
But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly, through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts.
~ William Gibson
In the fecund shock-waves of the explosion, it was not only the Surrealists' own dreams that had manifested. Born with them were symbols from Symbolism and Decadence, imaginings of the surrealists' ancestors and beloveds, ghosts from their proto-canon.
~ China Mieville
There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law?
~ China Mieville
You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.
~ China Mieville
There's this thing about ghosts: Once you've seen one, you can basically see them all. At least the ones that want to be seen.
~ Chris Grabenstein
Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?...Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts....They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind." "Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles." "The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin.
~ Christina Baker Kline
No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn't given a choice. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I'd lost. The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on.
~ Christina Baker Kline
I am ninety-one years old, and almost everyone who was once in my life is now a ghost. Sometimes these
~ Christina Baker Kline
I believe in ghosts. They're the ones who haunt us, the ones who have left us behind. Many times in my life I have felt them around me, observing, witnessing, when no one in the living world knew or cared what happened.
~ Christina Baker Kline
The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on.
~ Christina Baker Kline
the haunted always take refuge in stillness.
~ Christina Dodd
White, caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent in the English sky, of all the imaginary lines men and time had drawn upon the landscape. By the fire, his hawk by his side, he brooded on the fate of nations.
~ Helen Macdonald
Later in the morning Miranda opened her wardrobe and found it full of clammy ghosts that hovered around her body when she put them on. The cold trickled down in the gaps between the material and her chest. Scarecrow girl. She felt proud and nauseous, chosen and moulded by hands that froze.
~ Helen Oyeyemi
behind dim empires vaguer ghosts of empire loom.
~ Henry George
To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.
~ Henry Miller
I used to lie for hours staring into the dark of the sleeping house, feeling the loneliness that only the sleepless know when the queer feeling comes that it is the sleeping who are alive and those awake are disembodied ghosts.
~ Leonard Everett Fisher
No, little one, George's ghost won't come back. Human beings don't have souls. No soul, no ghost. Simple." "How can you say that?" protested Mopple. "We don't know whether humans have souls or not." "Every lamb knows that your soul is in your sense of smell. And human beings don't have very good noses." Maude herself had an excellent sense of smell, and often thought about the problem of souls and noses. "So you'd only see a very small ghost. Nothing to be afraid of.
~ Leonie Swann
How can anybody be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense?
~ Leonora Carrington
We're all ghosts here, you just don't look like one yet.
~ Lev Grossman
I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.
~ Junot Diaz