Quotes & Sayings About Ghosts Of The Past

If you lack the humility to go back and tie up the loose ends in your past, then be prepared to forever be haunted by her ghosts, all of whom will come into your present and your future - staining everything and everyone with their leftover emotional and mental garbage. Humility is the master key that can get you out of all your cages; why do you choose your ego and stay in your prisons? — C. JoyBell C.

When the gray November weather came, and hung its soft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields and the vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy stillness weighed my heart down to a forlorn yearning after the pleasant things of childhood, the petting, the comforting, the warming faith in the unfailing wisdom of the elders. A great need of something to lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

On the ghosts in Moorehawke & Into The Grey/Taken Away:
The ghosts ... are symbolic of those unresolved moments in history that linger, and affect the next generation. Sometimes this happens without that generation ever really knowing the truth of what has come before. This is so true of war, I think, where we are often only left the stories that the previous generation wanted us to hear ... How much harder would the truth be to deny were it lingering about as an actual manifestation of the past? — Celine Kiernan

Every city is a ghost.
New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park. — Libba Bray

Is this neuro-bot really supposed to be her, this creature, this thing, compiled of the ghosts of human data, the replicas of their past? — Bremer Acosta

The morning heat had already soaked through the walls, rising up from the floor like a ghost of summers past. — Erik Tomblin

I also seemed to realize that a beautiful scene, once it had existed, would always be. The present loss was just a matter of separation in time, and this separation I felt could be overcome. An inextinguishable revelation had struck; the universe showed a different structure. In this structure our lives do not just pass through time in such a way that a moment in time or a station in life once past is lost. Life in its creativity changes the absolute nature of time: it makes past into present, no, it melds past, present, and future into one inextinguishable, multilayered scene, a three-dimensional body. This is what ghosts are, and not only did I not fear them, I even began to yearn for them. — Fei Xiaotong

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Arms wrapped around me, I looked over the past boxed up and piled haphazardly about, like memories in a person's brain. It was only a matter of knowing where a thought was and dusting it off. — Kim Harrison

A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods - the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep. — H.P. Lovecraft

You did not wake me," Maester Aemon replied. "I find I need less sleep as I grow older, and I am grown very old. I often spend half the night with ghosts, remembering times fifty years past as if they were yesterday. The mystery of a midnight visitor is a welcome diversion. So tell me, Jon Snow, why have you come calling at this strange hour? — George R R Martin

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts ... it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us. — Henrik Ibsen

The English language is direct, unapologetic, and wonderfully amoral. Italian has a beautiful sound, but you cannot help but feel that you are always dealing with ghosts from the past and the looming dark presence of the Vatican. — Chiara Barzini

I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived. — Junot Diaz

I've never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother's eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me. No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave? ... All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see 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 own ghosts; we haunt ourselves. — Diana Gabaldon

When we are wounded it's as if something is stolen from us. We adapt and accept a particular truth that sets us up to behave a certain way in the future when we are faced with a situation that reminds us of the past. What we know about ourselves becomes influenced by our perception of these events. We associate and project the qualities of those who hurt us onto others unfairly. Every situation may appear similar, but people are not. Look at the people that love you and not the reminder of ghosts. — Shannon L. Alder

Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone.
All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding 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.
Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence.
Our rational minds say, "No, it isn't."
But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, "Yes, but it could be. — Diana Gabaldon

His rapier was at his belt, glittering as he swung. He reached down, ripped the sword clear.
I jumped over a slashing frond of plasm, spun round with the water bottle in my hand. I hurled it across to Lockwood.
George threw his rapier to me.
Watch this now. Sword and bottle, sailing through the air, twin trajectories, arching beautifully through the mass of swirling tendrils towards Lockwood and me. Lockwood held out his hand. I held out mine.
Remember I said there was that moment of sweet precision when we gelled perfectly as a team?
Yeah, well. This wasn't it.
The rapier shot past, missing me by miles. It skidded halfway across the floor. The bottle struck Lockwood plumb in the centre of his forehead, knocking him through the window.
There was a moment's pause.
'Is he dead?' the skulls voice said 'Yay! Oh. No, he's hanging onto the shutters. Shame. Still, this is defiantly the funniest thing I've ever seen. You three really are incompetence on a stick — Jonathan Stroud

When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.' — Sara Paretsky

Sometimes I like to think I live with ghosts. Not from my past, but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas, floating around too, but they usually don't last that long. They're more like mayflies; they're born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they fall to the floor, dead, about twenty four hours later. — Scarlett Thomas

America was different. America was a river, roarng along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins. — Khaled Hosseini

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors. — Ivan Chtcheglov

Out here, the deadly shit seeking your blood and meat is not confined to snakes and bears and weather. Other forces resent your presence too. Ghosts of long-gone wolves and buffalo and Indians and pioneers, dead in the service of implacable history. If you stop and camp early, while it's still early, while it's still daylight
claim your space, plant your flag, build your fire
you push them back into the past. But alone in the dark, the minute you sit your ass down they circle close around. Lie on the ground, and the cold seeps up as they try to equalize your temperature with theirs. Get quiet, and you hear the voices. A few words in English, but mostly in other languages. The ones that came before the Indians. Words the long-gone animals thought to one another. Words flowing against you. Wishing you ill. Yet, somehow, all gentle as an outbreath. — Charles Frazier

Like Clara's, Dawson's ghost was everywhere. — Nicholas Sparks

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment. — Ken Burns

Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth. — Hannah Lillith Assadi

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243) — Norman Doidge

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. — John Updike

A city obsessed by its ghosts seems to be weighted down by a conflicted view of the past. Something close to melancholy: a weight it can't quite let go of, a lingering sadness. And though we don't often think of the United States in these terms, this melancholy is as much a part of our history as our triumphs. — Colin Dickey

Tonight you will be visited by three spirits. The ghosts of indictment past, present, and future. They will teach you the true meaning of 'you are still a scumbag criminal. — Jim Butcher

To a Scot, the past clings like sand to wet feet,
and is carried about as a burden.
The many ghosts are always a part of them, inescapable. — Geddes MacGregor

I didn't know that I've completely left them all in the past. There's a part of me, wishing and hoping, that she would come back for me, and we would start a new life together, but she didn't. — Diyar Harraz

There is no feeling that is comparable to that of being truly lost. I don't mean lost in the woods, or desert, but lost in the way that only can happen internally. Lost to the deepest,
blackest pit of your soul, clinging to ghosts of past times, when you thought you knew who and
what you were. When this happens, you have two choices; you can give in to your darkest inclinations,
and accept what you are, or you can fight, knowing that it is a losing battle, that the good half
of your soul is strong, but can never erase the bad part. — H.D. Gordon

Many people have told me that they regretted Matthew's death in Green Gables. I regret it myself. If I had the book to write over again I would spare Matthew for several years. But when I wrote it I thought he must die, that there might be a necessity for self-sacrifice on Anne's part, so poor Matthew joined the long procession of ghosts that haunt my literary past. — L.M. Montgomery

But you must stop playing among his ghosts
it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair. — Patricia A. McKillip

If you don't believe in ghosts, why you wake up from nightmares screaming out the names of your dead friends? — Peter Fryer

When autumn gusts blew in from the Rideau Lakes, parched brown leaves swirled and scattered around the sides of the neglected building, forming mounds like grave-markers, for ghosts of the past, who lingered on the dust-covered dance floor. — Arlene Stafford-Wilson

I cry as the laughter inside me drowns
and descends
into the water
with the ghosts of our union. — A.P. Sweet

But there's nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present.
They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there's no competition. I've stopped fighting them. They're crashing and banging around in there now. Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry - I see you already have.
Damn ghosts. — Sara Gruen

There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law? — China Mieville

Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers. — Eve Chase

Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal. — Elisabeth Lenk

Sometimes the best and worst times of your life can coincide. It is a talent of the soul to discover the joy in pain - -thinking of moments you long for, and knowing you'll never have them again. The beautiful ghosts of our past haunt us, and yet we still can't decide if the pain they caused us out weighs the tender moments when they touched our soul. This is the irony of love. — Shannon L. Alder

I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts. — Hannah Lillith Assadi

I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth. — Eva Rice

Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it. We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we're feeding our suffering while we're walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We're not living our lives. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we've offered and those we have yet to make. — Tom Piccirilli

Ghosts from the past weave spells in the present to draw a veil of secrecy over the future. — Sean Best

I put on slight music I could ignore and started to write. The type of this music I most favored they no longer made. Turns out they asked around one day and I was the only one enjoying it so they decided to just stop making it. Most of the bands that were making the music when this decision was made simply disappeared and got real jobs, the ones that survived made different music that appealed to more people. The result was that when I listened to that music it felt a bit like travelling to the past or visiting ghosts, and this despite the undeniable fact that a very healthy portion of the music I listened to otherwise was created a far longer time ago, by people long-departed, yet produced no similar feelings. — Sergio De La Pava

In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a "dead concept," but equally unhealthy
were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abrac
and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time. — Michael Pollan

If you do not want to be forgotten as soon as you are dead...be read, or try coming back and pull the feet of those who are still alive instead! — Ana Claudia Antunes

The future is all possibilities, but the past is set in stone. All those ghosts of ourselves, our youth, still alive inside us, but out of our reach forever. We meet them when we close our eyes, when we let our memories come alive. But that's all they are. Memories. No more real than a dream. — Wendy Mass

Ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present — Joanne Greenberg

When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us. — Aimee Bender

Kugel didn't like attics, he never did. The roofing nails overhead like fangs, waiting to sink into his skull; the cardboard boxes and plastic crates and leather trunks - tombs, sarcophagi - full of ghosts and regret and longing and loss; worse yet was the implication in all this emotional hoarding that the past was preferable to the present, that what came before bests whatever comes next, so clutch it to your chests in mourning and dread as you head into the unknowable but probably lousy future. — Shalom Auslander

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines. — Hilary Mantel

There were two things Southerners hated to see knocking on their door. Jehovah Witnesses, because the majority of us were Baptist, and the undertaker. It was understandable that when Terk Rhinehammer opened the door, his face turned white as all the blood was drained from it after he looked past me and saw my hearse.
"What's wrong?" He used his hands to pat down his chest. "I'm not dead, am I? — Tonya Kappes

Could people truly be happy if they were unwilling to put the ghosts of their past to rest? I suspected no. — L.A. Fiore

The long blue shadows of afternoon advanced before me like cheerful ghosts of last summer's growth, dancing past the withered flower borders and the stiff hedges to fall at the feet of a stone nymph, her cascade of water frozen in her urn. — Stephanie Barron

Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores. — Martin Amis

Let him join the men of the past. Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed. — Sarah Hall

Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of God
better than the visions themselves? Then you think,
none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigarette
and think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,
under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts. — Derek Keck

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream. — William Gibson

Landale's language burns away the mists of the past, preparing a place of welcome for our ghosts. — John Newlove

I love the Warner Brothers lot. There is so much history there. They've done such a smart thing. They have signs outside of each stage which tell you what movies and TV shows were shot inside. So cool ... you can almost feel the ghosts of actors past. — Valerie Azlynn

Most of what brings me solace and peace are nothing more than ghosts of my past, yet I hold tightly to keep them with me in the present for fear that without them, I just might disappear too. — E.K. Blair

There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics. — Tony Kushner

Charleston is an extraordinary place. There is a deep connection between the residents and nearly three hundred and fifty years of history, and those ties between daily life and the distant past are strengthened by the occasional glimpse beyond the veil. — James Caskey

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story. — Neil Gaiman

...Nyla was right in predicting that, for me, life would go on into old age and my promise has been kept too, for every now and then over the years, the ghosts have slipped out from the past and I have kept brief company with my friends of long ago. — Edward Beauclerk Maurice

Did he know that undoubtedly the time would come occasionally when the ghosts of Kevin's past would loom up and haunt him again?
"Yes," he said, "Don't they for all of us? — Torey L. Hayden

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen. — Iris Murdoch

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives - trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone. — Rod Serling

We've ghosts enough between us, Sassenach. If the evils of the past canna hinder us-neither then shall any fears of the future. We must just must put things behind us and get on. Aye? — Diana Gabaldon

For over twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

I do believe in ghosts, or at least in some kind of persistent spiritual echoes of the past in certain places. — Jennifer McMahon

The streets are full of in-betweens, and no one is alarmed by the ghosts that live among us. Everyone here knows that the past inhabits the future. For now, I'm home. — Katie Gilmartin

I always liked it when people go back in time to discover things about themselves, like with 'A Christmas Carol' and you're getting a tour of your life by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. — John Cusack

THALES. Maybe so. Still, I'll defend a life Lived worthily in its brief time on earth. PROTEUS. A life like yours, yes - it persists Well past the bounds of mortal days. Among the crowd of pale and drifting ghosts 8620 I've noticed you these many centuries. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Memories are weird. They never really leave you alone, no matter how much you try, and the funny part is--the more you try, the more they haunt you. The more you want to run away, the faster they seem to catch up, and then there comes a time when you are convinced that you have finally managed to leave them behind and move on. You rejoice. You celebrate. You have exorcised the ghosts of the past--you feel liberated, UNTIL one fine day, some old memory creeps up slowly from behind and taps you on your shoulder just to say "Hi. How's it going so far?". That is when everything comes rushing in, and you realize that maybe, just maybe, it had never really gone away. — Priyanka Naik

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

America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn't forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required period exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences. — Libba Bray

Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about the past, you're no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act you are complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you're now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice. — Ken Liu

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. — Thomas Pynchon

The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields. — Alexandra Adornetto

A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life's moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here. — Michael Puttonen

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries. — John Banville

In Haven, old houses didn't settle. They carried a life of their own, and Blackwater farm was no exception. This was a house that would never be a home. The best they could hope for would be to co-exist with the ghosts of the past.
- The Silent Twin — Caroline Mitchell

I was sitting in the Temple of Karnak on the Nile, as the sun was going down, and I was all alone, and the great Hypostyle Hall was full of shadows and ghosts of the past, and suddenly I heard this little voice saying "my name is Taita, write my story" ... and if you believe that you'll believe anything. — Wilbur Smith

Sometimes the spirit of a man isn't strong enough to survive the ghosts of his past — Colleen Hoover

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality? — Virginia Woolf

In another Christmas story, Dale Pearson, evil developer, self-absorbed woman hater, and seemingly unredeemable curmudgeon, might be visited in the night by a series of ghosts who, by showing him bleak visions of Christmas future, past, and present, would bring about in him a change to generosity, kindness, and a general warmth toward his fellow man. But this is not that kind of Christmas story, so here, in not too many pages, someone is going to dispatch the miserable son of a bitch with a shovel. That's the spirit of Christmas yet to come in these parts. Ho, ho, ho. — Christopher Moore

Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up. — Ross Macdonald

We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn't the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don't go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Nico di Angelo has warned them: the House of Hades would stir their worst memories, make them see things and hear things from the past Their ghosts would become restless. — Rick Riordan

Mindy had explained that a lot of things had ghosts, not just people. Animals, machines, even things as vast as a paved-over forest or as humble as the smell of good cooking could leave traces of themselves behind. The world was haunted by the past. — Scott Westerfeld

We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers. — Agnes Repplier