House Of The Spirits Quotes & Sayings

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. — Thomas Browne

Although terrifying, the evil ghost will probably pose no real danger to you or your family. On the other hand, if you have a demonic infestation, your entire household is in very real danger. A demonic entity will not usually confront you or induce you to flee the home. Because, unlike the evil ghost, the demon does not actually want you to leave. On the contrary, it wants you to stick around so it can destroy your life and sully your soul from the inside. — Alexei Maxim Russell

The scent spread through the house like a long, soft blanket, settling over everything, calming all worries.
The labels on all the honey-lavender candy jars read:

'Lavender essence is for happiness
with a touch of honey to raise your spirits.
A joyful attitude is ravenous
consuming everyone who is near it. — Sarah Addison Allen

The family is both mystery and reality; it houses our bodies and our spirits. — Tian Dayton

As a child I always wanted to be a singer. The music my mother played in the house moved me - Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Mahalia Jackson. It was truly spiritual. It made you understand what God was. We are all spirits. We get depressed. But music makes you want to live. I know my music has saved my life. — Mary J. Blige

The idea that the spirits of those once tortured in the house might still be there was the avenue his imagination began to explore. The groaning of the wood sounded like screams from the dungeon and the clunking pipes were the implements of torture. His bedcovers seemed to offer less protection than they had done in his younger years, he felt naked and at the mercy of his thoughts, and it wasn't long before the skull he'd seen in the cellar had a face, manifested by fear and imagination. — Matthew Williams

The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns. — Herman Wouk

After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.
When passion comes late in life it is hard to bear.
One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.
I wished her goodnight, touching her hand only and thankful for the dark that hid her eyes. — Jeanette Winterson

Do you realize that a middle-class couple, one archaeologist, one dolls' expert, can't move from their house because ancient spirits are blocking them in? It's a reasonable sort of day's experience, isn't it? — Robert Holdstock

Every small town has at least one house the children whisper about; the type of house that has always been abandoned; where the once pristine white paint has faded to a grimy gray; where the windows are boarded, and the lawn never grows; where children hold their breath and close their eyes as they pass by. A house that sounds like it contains an army of whispering spirits when the wind whistles through the nearby trees.

In the town of Blackwood, that house could be found on Creep Street. It had stood there as long as he could remember. — The Blood Brothers

Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender apprehensiveness, "that the early Christians, instead of pulling down the heathen temples - the temples of the unclean gods - purified them by turning them to their own uses? I've always thought one might do that with one's actions - the actions one loathes but can't undo. One can make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall against them...." Her voice wavered on the word. "We can't always tear down the temples we've built to the unclean gods, but we can put good spirits in the house of evil - the spirits of mercy and shame and understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn't been in such great need.... — Edith Wharton

I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house ; but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit. — Wilkie Collins

That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however, as soon as the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his business-room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll's Will, and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson, though he took charge of it now that — Robert Louis Stevenson

The spirits of the dead are not among us to entertain us ... Assuming the revenants you encounter have simply signed up to play haunted house for the amusement of the living is just plain ignorant. — April Slaughter

You will remember that Albertus Magnus, after describing minutely the process by which spirits may be invoked and commanded, adds emphatically that the process will instruct and avail only to the few - that a man must be born a magician! - that is, born with a peculiar physical temperament, as a man is born a poet. Rarely are men in whose constitution lurks this occult power of the highest order of intellect - usually in the intellect there is some twist, perversity, or disease.' ("The House And The Brain") — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Stephen Tennant is the most sparkling talker who ever comes to my house, and perhaps the most amusing. He dances like the will-o'-the-wisp where other people stick in the mud. Though his really kindred spirits are the most exotic people he can find, he also greatly enjoys a talk with some extremely commonplace person, when he pretends that he thinks they mean something which they never thought of in their lives. He can be by turns poetic, malicious, and nonsensical. His talk is very pictorial and he handles words as if they were pait on a brush. When Stephen is alone with one friend he is often drawn to speak of very grave and profound subjects, and then he becomes unhappy, for he is never sure about what he loves and believes in, and would like to love and believe in so much. — Edith Olivier

Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,
not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,
and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them. — Henry David Thoreau

Months slip through the house surreptitiously, like uninvited spirits. — Beck Anderson

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do. — Wallace Stegner

Never invite any kind of spirit to enter either your home or your person. This is an extremely important point to remember. To do so always risks to unwittingly invite evil spirits in, instead. Good spirits never need to be invited in. — Alexei Maxim Russell

The distance between the glorified spirits in heaven and the militant saints on earth seems great; but it is not so. We are not far from home. Heaven ... is just one sigh and we get there. Our departed friends are only in the upper room, as it were, of the same house; they have not gone far off; they are upstairs and we are down below. — Charles Spurgeon

If we would accept heaven's life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and affairs. In this way, we accept a spiritual life by means of our moral and civic life; and there is no other way a spiritual life can be formed within us, no other way our spirits can be prepared for heaven. This is because living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like living in a house that has no foundation, that gradually either settles or develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses. — Emanuel Swedenborg

War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than she - yet according to ethics of nations it does. I have conquered her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is left in it belongs to my heirs and successors, forever. That is war! — Nellie L. McClung

During our ecstasies in the Himalayan caves, tigers will be spellbound and sit around us like tame pussies," my spirits froze; beads of perspiration formed on my brow. "What then?" I thought. "If the vicious nature of the tigers be not changed through the power of our spiritual trance, shall they treat us with the kindness of house cats?" In my mind's eye, I already saw myself the compulsory inmate of some tiger's stomach-entering there not at once with the whole body, but by installments of its several parts! — Anonymous

Empty space eventually fills up with something. A void, cultivated in the aftermath of misfortune, begins to attract the wrong kind of attention. Marco knew it was time to leave when disagreeable spirits started roaming freely through the house, as if they owned the place. — Rahma Krambo

And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain") — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Ten years ago, when I was living in a small flat above an off-licence in SW1, I learned that the big house next door had been bought by the wife of the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The street was obviously going down in the world, what with the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett by that nice Lord Lucan at number 44, and I moved out a few months later. I never met Hope Somoza, but her house became notorious in the street for a burglar alarm that went off with surprising frequency, and for the occasional parties that would cause the street to be jammed solid with Rolls - Royce, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar limousines. Back in Managua, her husband 'Tacho' had taken a mistress, Dinorah, and Hope was no doubt trying to keep her spirits up. — Salman Rushdie

Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the "spirits" of things. — Dee Snider

I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. He was the saddest ghost in the house. — Ben Okri

Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire. — Cathleen Schine

The doctor from the mainland came and went. Silence settled over the island again, like a displaced curtain falling back in thickened, heavier folds. For there was a different quality in the silence now. It had tasted something, rich food on which it had long been thinly rationed. Shadowy things were trooping up, called by that scent of blood, like flies that smell carrion. They were not strangers to the old house; they had been ill-fed and at a distance, now they were hungry and avid and near. — Evangeline Walton

Oh, no. That's just a name. Oswald isn't a man, he's an ondageist. Have you heard of poltergeists?" "Er ... invisible spirits that throw things around?" "Good," said Miss Level. "Well, an ondageist is the opposite. They're obsessive about tidiness. He's quite handy around the house, but he's absolutely dreadful if he's in the kitchen when I'm cooking. He keeps putting things away. I think it makes him happy. Sorry, I should have warned you, but he normally hides if anyone comes to the cottage. He's shy." "And — Terry Pratchett

The house is made up of the spirits of our ancestors. Did you think they would lie idly by while we were under attack?
'Cuz, yeah, didn't everybody's ancestors rise up and destroy enemies. — Christine Feehan

I knew I would lose my job when I accidentally set fire to my best friend's house. — Kathy Bryson

I'll kill you all," yelled Bill, and swore for three or four minutes, calling us every dirty name he could think of for being so chicken-hearted. When people talk about "leadership quality" I often think of Bill Unsworth; he had it. And like many people who have it, he could make you do things you didn't want to do by a kind of cunning urgency. We were ashamed before him. Here he was, a bold adventurer, who had put himself out to include us
lily-livered wretches
in a daring, dangerous, highly illegal exploit, and all we could do was worry about being hurt! We plucked up our spirits and swore and shouted filthy words, and set to work to wreck the house. — Robertson Davies

If your spirit is persistently harmless or if it has shown itself to you, in a non-threatening way, then you most definitely have a ghost. The ghost can be frightening, by its very nature. But the ghost will never intentionally frighten you. They will be there for three reasons: 1. They used to live there and are attached to the location 2. They are trying to communicate something to the living or 3. They are protective of somebody who lives in the house and so they are "standing guard" so to speak, over the loved one. — Alexei Maxim Russell

I've always been a person afraid of the dark. I was taught that when you have complete darkness, that's when spirits walk. In our house when I was growing up, all the doors were always cracked a little bit at night so you could get light into the room. — Tony Dorsett

The person whose house has been cleared of demonic influence retains an uncanny susceptibility and vulnerability. Care must be redoubled, for the "unclean spirit" wanders through waste places and finds no rest; it forces its way back into its former habitation and "finds it empty, swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first" (Mt 12:43 ff). The person to whom Jesus has said "Go and sin no more" (Jn 8:11) must be supported until he is sufficiently established in his new freedom. But — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

If prayers can move mountains, certainly it can drive evil spirits away from your house. Let Professional Prayer Warriors help you. — Ann Marie Aguilar

Christmas Eve Saint Francis and Saint Benedight Blesse this house from wicked wight; From the night-mare and the goblin, That is hight good fellow Robin: Keep it from all evil spirits, Fairies, weezels, rats, and ferrets: From curfew time To the next prime. — Thomas Cartwright