Quotes About Specters

Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.

Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names.

of things, mute specters haunting the dramas of seduction

A city of harelipped ghosts

Engelbert Humperdinck

Silent as specters, the tall and the fat thief edged past the dead, noose-strangled watch-leopard, out the thick, lock-picked door of Jengao the Gem Merchant, and strolled east on Cash Street through the thin black night-smog of Lankhmar, City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes.

Luck was with me. I saw no spiders. Luck was against me. I saw no specters.

A man ahead of his time, Oresme suggested that the source of demons and specters could be the disease of melancholy.

Much of junk culture has a core of crisis shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

Night favors belief, and the imagination peoples the air with specters.

A new generation forgets the specters that may have tormented the old… And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same specter assailing the same man century after century.

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

They glided out of the heat-haze on their camels like specters. There were twenty of them, and they were Tuareg. Their faces were hidden by black veils that left only slits for the eyes, and they wore purple robes that fluttered in the desert wind. They carried swords, muskets and seven-foot iron spears, and wore stilettos in sheaths on their left forearms. They were an impressive, sinister sight.

Ghosts are both remnants of history and witnesses to it.

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her specters within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.

They came like specters from the dark maw of the bayou, first ghostly light in the fog, then the rasp of a motor: an aluminum powerboat scudding across lacquer-black water.

Luck was with me. I saw no spiders. Luck was against me. I saw no specters.

I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.

I have thought that I have seen ghosts on many occasions.

So many horrid Ghosts.

The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters' food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.

Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.

I can see ghosts.

I began at that point the emotional examination to note how far my convalescence had gone — I was taller, bigger generally in relation to these stairs, I had more money and success and "security" than in the days when specters seemed to go up and down with me.