Quotes About Ghosts

All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hidding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.

The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move.

This is already true now, when you are still occupied, each with the other's presence, in an exclusive fashion. Imagine how it will be in a little while, when ghosts that do not meet will frequent your minds, accompanying the encounters of your bodies tested by habit.

Forse l'impero,pensò Kublai,non è altro che uno zodiaco di fantasmi della mente.

In her voice you seek the confirmation of your need to cling to the things that exist, to read what is written and nothing else, dispelling the ghosts that escape your grasp.

Jeez. Not even the ghosts wanted to have lunch with me.

The ghosts in fire freeze and the ghosts in ice burn. Some died long ago; some were never born. Some ride the blood in my veins until it reaches my brain. Sometimes I even mistake myself for one. Sometimes I am one.

Today's ghost stories tend to be much more physically or psychologically violent. The Victorians were much more leisurely about what might or could happen, building suspense layer by layer rather than punching you in the face.

Around it, the elements of a world were settling into place. An odd structure. I looked back to the time when I had first built that set, positioning various ghosts there, most of whom had never taken substance. I found my way back there, the same even today. As before, isolation, sadness, the impossibility of my settling down, of accepting one destiny among so many others I'd have found equally uninviting.

Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam, Some of their names - not all - we learnt in school But, life being short, we rarely read their poems, Mere source-books now to point or except a rule, While those opinions which rank them high are based On a wish to be different or on lack of taste.

Curiously, ghosts are rarely if ever seen in the nude. They appear fully clothed, and may even change clothing on subsequent appearances. They may change their form, to appear as they looked at different stages of their lives. Unless someone out there knows of an extoplasmic department store on the spiritual plane, we have to wonder, "Where do the clothes and accessories come from?"

New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died.

I know these ghosts. I know what it's like to move around in the world, but not really be a part of it. And I know what it's like to have people stare right through you, and not believe what they are seeing. If I exist, why can't they?

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.

You hear about ghosts: sad ghosts, angry ghosts.I'll tell you, the worst is when they laugh, and the worst sort are the ones whose faces I've forgotten.

This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one.

Regret is the sound of the ghosts of our own making. I will live with mine until I die.

For dreams, too, are ghosts, desires chased in sleep, gone by morning.

Quite by chance, her talk of ghosts comes on the very day the book I am in the middle of reading has completely disappeared, only to be replaced by a novella by Henry James.

No hay una vieja casa que no tenga sus historias; no existe una vieja casa que no tenga sus fantasmas.

remembered the gray cat that had appeared, as if by magic, on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly with his round yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my secrets, he did not seem the least perturbed, but only blinked and continued to stare indifferently. "What's his name?" I had asked. "Shadow," she absently replied.

Pero mi vida no sólo está acechada por el porvenir, también lo está por los fantasmas de mi propio pasado, que surgieron luego del deceso de quien encarnaba todo lo que yo había querido abandonar, todo con lo que había querido romper y que, seguramente, había constituido para mí una suerte de modelo social negativo, un contrapunto en el trabajo que había llevado a cabo para crearme a mí mismo.