GHOST QUOTES II
quotations about ghosts
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry IV, Part I
Ghosts are a metaphor for memory and remembrance and metaphorically connect our world to the world we cannot know about.
LESLIE WHAT
interview, June 2002
In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts ... it's just accepted. And in Western culture it's just not.
JESSICA ALBA
Yareah Magazine
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.
JIM MORRISON
An American Prayer
Do you really want to know where we come from?... In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?
BRENNA YOVANOFF
The Replacement
In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.
STEVEN PINKER
How the Mind Works
Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea.... We are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
HENRIK IBSEN
Ghosts
Ghosts have a way of misleading you; they can make your thoughts as heavy as branches after a storm.
REBECCA MAIZEL
Infinite Days
Ghosts are far from the chill, remote beings we think they are. They can be intensely passionate -- it is because they lived so passionately in life that they hang around after death. Intense fear, love, hate -- the traumas of war, the transcendence of mystical prayer -- these passions are what make ghosts so interesting.
PAUL GATER
The Secret Lives of Ghosts
With all the ghost tales told, records kept and books written about ghosts, there seems to be no order as to kinds and varieties of ghosts. No classification of ghosts has been given. No information of a science of ghosts is at hand, that if one sees a ghost he might know what kind of a ghost it is. One may learn to know and be unafraid of ghosts as of his shadows without giving them too much attention or being unduly influenced by them.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
Some people go to mediums to bring them into contact with the spirit world, but most go to bartenders.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Even a ghost is like a solid place against which your gaze clangs and heaves; but there, in that black pelt of nothingness, your fiercest look somehow merely dissolves: just as a madman, when he's on a roll, raves and stamps around in the manic dark only to break himself on the padded wall.
KARL KIRCHWEY
The Happiness of This World
For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?
CHARLES DICKENS
Master Humphrey's Clock
Ghosts frequent certain localities more than they do others. Generally, the accounts of ghosts are fewer in the city than in the country, where the dwellers are few and far between. In the country districts the mind turns more readily to thoughts of nature sprites and elves and fairies, and re-tells tales of them, and keeps alive ghosts that are born of man. In the city, the rush of business and pleasure holds men's thought. Men have no time for ghosts. Lombard Street's and Wall Street's ghosts do not, as such, attract man's thought. Yet there ghosts influence and make their presence felt, as surely as do the ghosts of a hamlet, nestling on the side of a mountain near a dark forest, and the heaths at the border of a bog.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
ITALO CALVINO
The Literature Machine
You might think of a haunting as a loop of video or audio tape playing itself over and over for you to watch. Trying to interact with it would be akin to trying to interact with a show on your TV: sure, you can turn it off or change the channel, but I wouldn't expect the actors to suddenly stop and talk to you directly.
LOYD AUERBACH
interview
There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
Yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.
LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON
Wintergirls
Ghosts come into and pass out of being whether or not man knows of their being, whether he gives much or little thought to them. Because of man, ghosts exist. While man continues as a thinking being and has desires, ghosts will continue to exist.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
I don't believe that ghosts are "spirits of the dead" because I don't believe in death. In the multiverse, once you're possible, you exist. And once you exist, you exist forever one way or another. Besides, death is the absence of life, and the ghosts I've met are very much alive. What we call ghosts are lifeforms just as you and I are.
PAUL F. ENO
Footsteps in the Attic