Quotes & Sayings About Ghosts And Death

Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death. — Henry MacKenzie

The banana flavour of his accidental conception, and the banana theme of his accidental death, now all seemed to conspire against him and rather suggest the universe, Mr Fate or whoever did have some sort of master plan after all. Despite all his earlier conjecturing, maybe the universe, Mr Fate or whoever was laughing its fat and meddling head at him. The outlandish evidence did seem to speak for itself, truly suggesting a mocking narrative devised by some mischievous author because quite simply a banana condom had brought Midnight into the world and a banana skin had seen him out. Putting those two seeming truths together, Midnight was once again forced to ask such confused and searching questions like:
What is this place, where am I heading? And what's the deal with all the ruddy bananas? — Tom Conrad

Many different kinds of sprouts lay torn. Green, purple and orange leaves lay scattered across the dark soil, and the thorn fence surrounding the bed had a fist-sized hole in it. Teacher eased himself into a squat, poked at the inside of the hole. Whatever made the hole had left blood on the thorns. The sprouts looked like wispy ghosts, pale and broken. Their delicate leaves and stems were riddled with bites. Life drained out of them like water dripping from a hanging cloth, and a breeze made them dance sadly. It felt like a funeral.
Teacher picked up a gnawed berry and gently squeezed it until purple juice dripped down his thumb. He placed the berry by the plant's roots.
Chandi's small face bunched up. "Are they dead?"
"They're dying, yes." Yuvali took her hand. "But their bodies will help other plants grow. — B.T. Lowry

Even from high above, I could feel Amanda's hate. Or perhaps it was another dimension of my Shadow, my own hate for her closing in on me. Despite all I had learned and seen, I wished to God someone would choke her to death so I could get ahold of her and choke her some more. — Christopher Pike

I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind. — Peter S. Beagle

Aren't you afraid, Renuka?' he asked in the wee hours of the morning looking deep into her eyes.
'Afraid of what?'
'Afraid of ghosts? Afraid of death?'
'Death is a certainty that will come to all of us one day. So why to be afraid of something that we cannot avoid? We do not remember our birth, so we won't remember our death as well. I am, instead, scared of more real threats, real people, and their real feelings. — Debajani Mohanty

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalised ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many ... can be recalled by name. But they are not the living-dead. There is a difference. — James W. Loewen

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked
By various diseases of the intellect
Or failing body. How am I still upright?
And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night.

How did it come to this? How else but through
The course of years, and what its workings do
To wood, stone, glass and almost all the metals,
Smouldering already in the fresh rose petals.

Our energy deceived us. Blessed with the knack
To get things done, we thought to get it back
Each time we lost it, just by taking breath -
And some of us are racing yet as we face death.

Well, good to see you. Sorry I have to fly.
I'm struggling with a deadline, God knows why,
And ghosts keep interrupting. Think of me
The way I do of you. Quite often. Constantly. — Clive James

But then, she wonders,just what kind of man would ever give her the courage to marry at all- to overcome that dreadful fear of death that seemed always to accompany the very thought of love? It was illogical, idiotic and childish. And yet the child was with her always; and always she would be afraid unless someone could place a light down there inside that dark and chilly heart of hers and chase all the ghosts away - the ghosts of Katherine Howard, of Jane Seymour and, not least, that of her own poor mother. They accompanied her always, those spirits - especially at this kind of time, a time of being alone, of being feminine and reflective. They would all gather round to whisper in her ear and warn her - so that even as she looks up once more into her mirror she almost expects to see them there, ranged behind her shoulders, their faces full of concern and anxiety. Never trust them - never trust the men, for they will betray you always the moment you surrender to them! — Robert Stephen Parry

If God could do things like that, the world wouldn't look the way it does. He can't reach down and change things. He can't stop any of us doing what we choose to do.'

"What use is he then?"

Oenone shrugged. 'He sees. He understands. He knows how you're feeling. He knows how Theo felt. He knows how it feels to die. And when we die, we go to him.'

'To the Sunless Country, you mean? Like ghosts?"'

Oenone shook her head patiently. 'Like children. Do you remember what it was like to be a tiny child? When everything was possible and everything was given to you, and you knew that you were safe and loved, and the days went on forever? When we die, it will be like that again. That's how it is for Theo now, in heaven. — Philip Reeve

Death continues to stalk the streets, stealing the souls of our children as they sleep. We're running out of fingers to close their eyes, voices to bless their souls, hands to dig their graves. Poisonous fumes from their unburied bodies contaminate the alleys, and the ghosts of those who have been buried rise nightly. Their tiny forms dance above their tombstones, an agonising reminder that we've failed them. — Joanne Owen

But if you wish, you can imagine that the Shadow does wait for your return and that it does remember everything that has gone before and that it doesn't let you accept yourself as perfect until you let it. There is truth in that. That is why a child usually cries as soon as it's born. With its first breath, the Shadow returns. — Christopher Pike

Men's bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend he circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural. — Jesmyn Ward

People can attach themselves to something
an idea, another person, a desire
with an impossibly strong grip, and in the case of restless ghosts, a grip stronger than death. Will is a powerful thing. Will
it's supposed to be a good treat, a more determined and persistent version of determination and persistence. But will and obsession
they sit right next to each other. They pretend to be strangers and all the while meet secretly at midnight. - — Deb Caletti

The Comtesse's fellow prisoners in this antechamber to death were characteristic of the ill-assorted gatherings thrown together in Revolutionary prisons: duchesses and prostitutes, actresses and politicians: the Duchesse de Crequy-Montmorency and Madame Roland; Madame du Barry and Madame Brissot; the random debris of a sunken ship thrown together for a moment by the tide of fortune and a moment later violently dispersed. All of them were already ghosts, standing on the shoreline of the last limits of life, waiting their turn for Charon and his grim tumbrel to ferry them across the Styx. — Stanley Loomis

So how exactly was I supposed to wrap my head around the whole thing? I wasn't entirely sure I could trust this guy. I mean, this was it? Really? My life ends and some creep in a grungy leather jacket takes me away? No, I couldn't accept that. -Jen — Nessie Strange

He who kills from afar knows nothing at all about act of killing. He who kills from afar derives no lesson from life or from death; he neither risks nor stains his hands with blood, nor hears the breathing of his adversary, nor reads the fear, courage, or indifference in his eyes. He who kills from afar tests neither his arm, his heart, nor his conscience, nor does he create ghosts that will later haunt him every single night for the rest of his life. He who kills from afar is a knave who commends to others the dirty and terrible task that is his own. — Arturo Perez-Reverte

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? — Richard Dawkins

When We That Wore the Myrtle Wear the Dust

When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust,
And years of darkness cover up our eyes,
And all our arrogant laughter and sweet lust
Keep counsel with the scruples of the wise;
When boys and girls that now are in the loins
Of croaking lads, dip oar into the sea, -
And who are these that dive for copper coins?
No longer we, my love, no longer we -
Then let the fortunate breathers of the air,
When we lie speechless in the muffling mould,
Tease not our ghosts with slander, pause not there
To say that love is false and soon grows cold,
But pass in silence the mute grave of two
Who lived and died believing love was true. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

There are humans, and there are ghosts. Vampires are just in a different state of transition. Not part of the human world and not part of the spirit world. We are just caught somewhere in between life and the real death." - Quinn Forrester-Song of the Vampire — K.M. McFarland

Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends
the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. — H. Rider Haggard

On the street, men appeared to me like mad ghosts, old skeletons out of joint, whose bones, badly strung together, were falling to the pavement with a strange noise. I saw the necks turning on top of broken spinal columns, hanging upon disjointed clavicles, arms sundered from the trunks, the trunks themselves losing their shape. And all these scraps of human bodies, stripped of their flesh by death, were rushing upon one another, forever spurred on by a homicidal fever, forever driven by pleasure, and they were fighting over foul carrion. — Octave Mirbeau

There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams. — Peter Rollins

If
If your hand came, dead in the dead of night,
And touched my forehead, waking me to see
You standing dead there in the dead of night,
I who fear ghosts would have no fear at all.
I'd greet you with the tenderest hello
And you would smile, though sad. And then you'd go.
There would be nothing deathly in your death
For your love always was the laughing sort
That quickened life and would not die with death.
And when you'd gone, I would not want to weep
That loving gaiety would still be there
Filling with its own peace the quickened air. — Norman MacCaig

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death. — John Aldridge

We are all ghosts," Morris Klapper said at last. "We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done. — Peter S. Beagle

He [Hamlet] sees ghosts and listens to dreams. And when his ghost father tells him that he (Hamlet Senior) was killed by his brother and asks Hamlet Junior to avenge his death, in the right, honorable way, Hamlet says yes, yes, yes, he'll do it.
But somehow he never gets round to it. Not like the other two young men in the play. The Norwegian Prince Fortinbras(...) has made his life [!!] pursuing the honor that his father lost when Hamlet Senior beat him in single combat. (...). When the lord chamberlain,Polonius, is killed, his son, Laertes, returns to the court immediately, demanding restitution, (...).
So there is no shortage of examples of how young men are expected to and do act in this world where honor demands an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. But Hamlet doesn't do it. Instead, he beats up on his girlfriend and he's cruel to his mother. — Tina Packer

He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too. — Hilary Mantel

Be strong! Don't talk of ghosts and devils. We are the living devils. The sign of life is strength and growth. The sign of death is weakness. Whatever is weak, avoid! It is death. If it is strength, go down into hell and get hold of it! There is salvation only for the brave. Everyone must work out his own salvation. — Swami Vivekananda

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it. — Tahir Shah

I let ya in - into my life ... my death ... my heart." He reached up like he was going to touch my face. "And now I don't know how to get ya out. — Janae Mitchell

Mira moved into the light like a sleepwalker, leaving Blue behind in the dust, the unused room, the past.
She thought of the fabled hundred years that cursed girls like her had slept, and how, after that much time, everything would be covered by a thick blanket of dust, including the princess. The intrepid prince would have to trust that something beautiful was hidden underneath. He'd kiss her and the first color to be revealed would be the chapped pink of her lips.
Her eyes went to Freddie, playing his guitar and lit by the sun. She couldn't picture him kissing a girl coated by dust - he was too alive for that.
He was golden. And she ... she was covered with death, with her grief over her parents. She'd tried to replace them with dreams, and she'd drifted through life in a haze, her eyes seeking ghosts instead of the world around her.
She was already asleep.
She had been for a long time. — Sarah Cross

The rancid odor mixed with the dust, death, and confusion as they awaited those who could clean up the mess and make death official. — G.G. Collins

Lockwood sat up awkwardly, adjusting his Bubble-Wrapped loops of chain. 'We're in good shape,' he said. 'We've lost the heavy duty chains and the stuff in the bags, but we've got our rapiers, iron, and silver seals. And we've found what we wanted now.'
I stared at the clean, calm surface of the door. 'Why couldn't it come after us? Ghosts can pass through walls.'
Lockwood shrugged. 'In some cases a Visitor is tied so completely to the room where it met its death that it no longer has any conception of there being any adjacent space at all. So ... when we left its hunting ground, it was as if we ceased to exist, as if we ceased to be ... '
I looked at him. 'You haven't really got a clue, have you?'
'No. — Jonathan Stroud

It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approch as the swell of a wave - a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do. — Maggie Nelson

how many ghosts I was going to encounter. That Serra guy had to have a bunch of Native Americans mad at him - particularly considering that corporal punishment thing - and I hadn't any doubt I was going to encounter all of them. And yet, when my mom and I walked through the school's wide front archway into the courtyard around which the Mission had been constructed, I didn't see a single person who looked as if he or she didn't belong there. There were a few tourists snapping pictures of the impressive fountain, a gardener working diligently at the base of a palm tree - even at my new school there were palm trees - a priest walking in silent contemplation down the airy breezeway. It was a beautiful, restful place - especially for a building that was so old and had to have seen so much death. I couldn't understand it. Where were all the ghosts? Maybe they were afraid to hang around the place. I was a little afraid, looking up at that crucifix. — Meg Cabot

How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much to have been loved. Just before the world vanishes, a hope surfaces in him that this wasn't necessarily everything, that he will return somehow.
His arm rises, remembering when it used to be a wing. — Nadeem Aslam

If I could, I'd deliver you from old age and death, from aches and pains, from the blandishments of ghosts, from the torment of your familiar, Goblin. I'd deliver you from heat and cold and from the arid dullness of the noonday sub. I'd deliver you into the placid light of the moon and into the domain of the Milky Way forever. — Anne Rice

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

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are. — Alan W. Watts

When the Sun sets, shadows, that shew'd at Noon But small, appear most long and terrible; So, when we think Fate hovers o'er our Heads, Our apprehensions shoot beyond all bounds, Owls, Ravens, Crickets seem the watch of death, Nature's worst Vermine scare her God-like Sons. Ecchoes the very leavings of a Voice, Grow babling Ghosts, and call us to our Graves: Each Mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus, While we fantastick Dreamers heave and puff, And sweat with an Imagination's weight ... — John Dryden

At Vipers, when the German gunners shot Afroze who chose to cry out his grief knowing the consequences rather than bear the death of a beloved in silence, a whisper burbled across the field: Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun. The men of the 40th, not all of them Muslim, whispered the words for the two dead men, and the prayer would have reached the gunners as wind on water or the sighs of ghosts. — Kamila Shamsie

I assure you; while I look like a ghost, I'm no spirit or demon. I'm nothing but a girl struggling to make her way in an intolerant world. I bleed, I love, and someday, I'll die. — Leanna Renee Hieber

My home is a red desert that trembles with spirits and bones.

There are two reasons I came here: my father's death, and the lion man who prowled my dreams. Perhaps it was coincidence, but a man--half wild, ravenous beyond words--slid from the dream world into the mud of the waking one the same year my father left this world for another.

Ghosts. Paw prints. I have tried to stay put. — Amy Irvine

When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts. — Roberto Bolano

And that's why, when they want to get rid of anyone, they usually bring him down here (like they were doing with me) and say they'll leave him to the ghosts. But I always wondered if they didn't really drown 'em or cut their throats. I never quite believed in the ghosts. But those two cowards you've just shot believed all right. They were more scared of taking me to my death than I was of going. — C.S. Lewis

These wires run a current through it. When we press the one and the nine at the same time, the current runs through the diamond and it emits a pulse that we can't hear or feel, but it..."
"Explodes ghosts."
"I prefer to think that it disperses the vestigial energy that an individual leaves behind after death."
"Or that," I said. — Maureen Johnson

Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed's coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour's death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe - Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise. — Dorothy Dunnett

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie. — Dylan Thomas

Maybe she'd seen too many Japanese horror movies, and maybe it was just a tingle of warning from generations of superstitious ancestors, but suddenly she knew that what Alyssa wanted was not to be saved, but for Shane to join her. In death. — Rachel Caine

The Dopey Science Creed: 1. I maintain that my life has no purpose and no meaning. The same is true for the entire universe. There is no purpose to anything. 2. I affirm that my morals come from my genes and my conditioning, not from decisions I make. Free will is an illusion. My personal identity is an illusion. 3. There are no "good" deeds, or "good people." There is no "bad," "evil," or "wrong" either. 4. Every report of encounters with spirits, angels, ghosts, and supernatural beings is bunk. The credibility or number of witnesses doesn't matter - it's all bunk. 5. I am my physical brain and nothing more. The death of my body is the death of me. — Alex Tsakiris

Be strong! ... You talk of ghosts and devils. We are the living devils. The sign of life is strength and growth. The sign of death is weakness. Whatever is weak, avoid! It is death. If it is strength, go down into hell and get hold of it! There is salvation only for the brave. "None but the brave deserves the fair." None but the bravest deserves salvation. — Swami Vivekananda

Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn't remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts. — Michelle Sagara West

Seven Cities was an ancient civilization, steeped in the power of antiquity, where Ascendants once walked on every trader track, every footpath, every lost road between forgotten places. It was said the sands hoarded power within their sussurating currents, that every stone had soaked up sorcery like blood, and that beneath every city lay the ruins of countless other cities, older cities, cities that went back to the First Empire itself. It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of crushed bone; that each city forever wept beneath the streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that brought life and the last breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred. — Steven Erikson

They said she killed herself.Everyone was saying It. What started out as a rumor, quietly whispered among small gatherings of polite people, quickly grew into something that was openly discussed in a large gatherings of impolite people. I was so sick of hearing them talk about It. They questioned me. Over and over again, trying to find out If i knew what happened. But my answers didn't change. Yet It never failed-someone else would ask, as if one day my reply would suddenly be different. I didn't know, but i should have ... and I've been haunted ever since. — Jessica Verday

London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others.
Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was ... at the extreme. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night.
A city where the dead could stay lost a long time — Mark Billingham

The only death the spirit recognizes is the denial of birth to that which strives to be born: those realities in ourselves that we have not allowed to live. The real ghost is a strange, persistent beggar at a narrow door asking to be born; asking, again and again, for admission at the gateway of our lives. Such ghosts I had, and thus, beyond all reason, I continued to be haunted. — Laurens Van Der Post

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore. — Dean Koontz

From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population. — Ian Fleming

Katherine is the master of anger; she dominates anger. She takes anger in her hands and twists its neck, ripping its head off. She throws anger against the wall and stomps it to death. Her voice rises, it changes, it conjures up ghosts and cusses in a spitting Irish brogue. Then, when she's tapped out empty, she picked anger up between her a thumb and a forefinger and carries it outside and drops it in the trash. On her way back, she scoops up forgiveness like a bouquet, sniffs it deep and arranges it in a vase. She sets forgiveness down, shining in the middle of everything. — Colleen Clayton

You read all kinds of books and see all kinds of movies about the man who is obsessed and devoted, whose focus is a single solid beam, same as the lighthouse and that intense, too. It is Heathcliff with Catherine. It is a vampire with a passionate love stronger than death. We crave that kind of focus from someone else. We'd give anything to be that "loved." But that focus is not some soul-deep pinnacle of perfect devotion - it's only darkness and the tormented ghosts of darkness. It's strange, isn't it, to see a person's gaping emotional wounds, their gnawing needs, as our romance? We long for it, I don't know why, but when we have it, it is a knife at our throat on the banks of Greenlake. It is an unwanted power you'd do anything to be rid of. A power that becomes the ultimate powerlessness. — Deb Caletti

In many parts of the world, ghosts are not considered to be a creation of local folklore, but a fact of life. In China the dead are understood to co-exist with the living, a belief which gave rise to the practice of ancestor worship, while in South America the deceased are honoured with annual festivals known as the Day of the Dead which suggests that the material world and the spirit world might not be as distinct as we might like to believe. In the Eastern and Asiatic religions it is believed that death is not the end, but simply a transition from one state of being to another. The Hindu Upanishads, for example, liken each human soul to a lump of salt taken from the ocean which must ultimately return to the source. — Paul Roland

The Cat
The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die wees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

We are the voices in the shadows,
Between the light and shade,
Betwixt life and restful death,
In the dark periphery of the unseen.

We're here,
At the edges.
We are the villainous punished,
The innocent murdered or abandoned,
Our lives ended by foul means, or unspeakable deeds.
We are your lovers long gone; your siblings forsaken.

Can you hear us?
At the edges

From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

I had already passed beyond the point of death and was now keeping company with ghosts who had joyfully come to claim me as one of their own. — Paul Sayer

Mama wasn't dead ... exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well that day, and Elma reckoned dead just meant pretendin' you couldn't move or breathe until nightfall when you got up and walked around like you was free. — Shannon Celebi

Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously. — Rebecca West

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Act 3, Scene 2 — William Shakespeare

Women know when men don't desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death - even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them. — John Irving

Maybe pulling her emotions out and inserting in his logic would change this morbid course. But damn if he'd joke about it like she did. — Kelly Moran

The only really frightening thing about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves to remind me that some of them-just a few of them, a tiny minority-are much more dangerous than all the dead put together. — Johnny Cash

When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt - we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice. — Jostein Gaarder