GHOST QUOTES III
quotations about ghosts
Many have tried to explain what ghosts are, and there are numerous theories -- all unproven. Nevertheless, these strange stories have forged our faith and our fears, many becoming the tales we tell each other on moonlit nights around a campfire.
RICHARD PALMISANO
Ghosts: An Investigation Into a True Canadian Haunting
It's easier to dismiss ghosts in the daylight.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Dragon Bones
Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead -- a dead parent, for example -- can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.
JACQUES DERRIDA
New York Times Magazine, Jan. 23, 1994
I think a Person who is thus terrified with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, 1711
Ghosts are never just ghosts; they provide us with an insight into what haunts our culture.
ANDREW SMITH
attributed, Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture
It is remarkable how much the belief of ghosts and apparitions of persons departed has lost ground within these fifty years. This may perhaps be explained by the general growth of knowledge; and by the consequent decay of superstition, even in those kingdoms where it is most essentially interwoven with religion. The same credulity, which disposed the mind to believe the miracles of a popish saint, set aside at once the interposition of reason; and produced a fondness for the marvelous, which it was the priest's advantage to promote. It may be natural enough to suppose that a belief of this kind might spread in the days of popish infatuation. A belief, as much supported by ignorance, as the ghosts themselves were indebted to the night.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
"An Opinion of Ghosts", Essays on Men and Manners
My first impulse, when I recognized the on-coming of that mental state which is evidenced by the goosing of one's flesh, if I may be allowed the expression, was to turn out the fire and go to bed. I have always found this the easiest method of ridding myself of unwelcome ghosts, and, conversely, I have observed that others who have been haunted unpleasantly have suffered in proportion to their failure to take what has always seemed to me to be the most natural course in the world--to hide their heads beneath the bed-covering.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others
The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.
STEPHEN KING
Bag of Bones
Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
We chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.
CHARLES DE LINT
Moonlight & Vines
So many ghosts, and forms of fright,
Have started from their graves to-night,
They have driven sleep from mine eyes away;
I will go down to the chapel and pray.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Golden Legend
Belief in ghosts is not of modern origin, but reaches back to the childhood of man, and the night of time. Try as they may, skepticism, disbelief and civilization cannot dislodge nor efface the belief in ghosts, as ghosts exist and have their origin in man. They are in him and of him, his own progeny. They follow him through age and race and, whether he does or does not believe in them, will, according to his kind, follow or precede him as do his shadows.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
For dreams, too, are ghosts, desires chased in sleep, gone by morning.
LIBBA BRAY
Lair of Dreams
In the older countries ghosts are stronger and more numerous than in America, because the populations of those countries have kept their ghosts alive through long ages, while in America the waters of the ocean washed over great portions of the land; and the remaining inhabitants of the dry parts were not numerous enough to keep the ghosts of the old civilizations alive.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
I am prepared to assert that if a thing with flashing green eyes, and clammy hands, and long, dripping strips of sea-weed in place of hair, should rise up out of the floor before me at this moment, 2 a.m., and nobody in the house but myself, with a fearful, nerve-destroying storm raging outside, I should without hesitation ask it to sit down and light a cigar and state its business--or, if it were of the female persuasion, to join me in a bottle of sarsaparilla--although every physical manifestation of fear of which my poor body is capable would be present.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others
No country is free from the belief in ghosts. In some parts of the world much time is given to ghosts; in other parts, few people think about them. Ghosts have a strong hold on the minds of the people of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In America are comparatively few believers in ghosts. But indigenous and imported ghost cults are on the increase, new ones are being developed, and America may, in the development of ghosts and their cults, succeed to or improve on what the old world has thereof.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
At certain times the belief in ghosts is wider spread than at others. Usually this is so after or during wars, pestilences, plagues. The reason is that calamity and death are in the air. With little time and untrained by study, the mind is turned to thoughts of death, and after. It gives audience and gives life to shades of the dead. The Middle Ages where such a time. In times of peace, when drunkenness, murder and crime are on the decrease--such acts give birth to and perpetuate ghosts--ghosts are less plentiful and less in evidence. The mind is turned from the death world to this world and its life.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913
Must be a rule in the ghost handbook--if in danger of evaporating, make sure you're in the middle of a dire pronouncement.
KELLEY ARMSTRONG
The Reckoning
Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
Which led them back to angels, after death.
WALLACE STEVENS
Evening Without Angels
In America, earlier civilizations are blotted out or buried; the ocean has washed over large tracts of the land; the waves have broken up and effaced the ghosts and most of the evil of man's work. When the land came up again it was purified and free. Forests wave and murmur over tracts once cultivated; desert sands glisten where the ruins of proud and populous cities lie buried. The peaks of mountain chains were islands with scattered remnants of indigenous tribes, which repeopled the sunken land on its emergence from the deep, free from its ancient ghosts. That is one of the reasons why America feels free. There is freedom in the air. In the old world such freedom is not felt. The air is not free. The atmosphere is filled with ghosts of the past.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Ghosts", The Word, July-September 1913