Quotes about haunting

Anne Rice - The Queen of the Damned

It was haunted but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally they have to do with the menace of memory.

Philip K. Dick - VALIS

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed you should try not to hear them.

David Weber - Oath of Swords

The splendor of that moment, its transcendent glory and aliveness, haunted him. He could thrust it aside by day, but it poisoned his dreams by night, calling to him and pleading with him to unlock the chains he'd bound about it.

Laura Miller - Butterfly Weeds

The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.

Kayla Krantz - Survive at Midnight

It reminded him of the truth—who he really was, and the fact that no matter how far he ran, his past would be right there with him.

A.S. Byatt - Angels and Insects

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.

Andrea Camilleri - The Terra-Cotta Dog

The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.

Kimberly Brockman -

I woke with sweat beading across my forehead and my hands balled into fists clutching the sheet over my eyes. The dreams. They were back. Haunting me relentlessly. I thought they were gone... I should've known better. (Rayne)

Kimberly Brockman - Raven

Something was bleeding… and something was broken. It was my heart… because I had to leave you. (Chase to Rayne)

Donna Lynn Hope -

I didn't sleep well last night because one of my ghosts came back, haunting with his presence, and when I woke up, the others weren't here, haunting with their memory.

Frederick Buechner - and Fairy Tale

Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do. ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the wor

Christina Harlin - Possessed

He wasn’t gullible enough to be bullied by the ghost’s accusation – for Andrew Fletcher had his share of guilt, but he’d never thrown anyone down a well, either.

Christina Harlin - Possessed

If you mean to scare women away from you, that speech can’t possibly work. Those threats? If I weren’t trying to hire you I’d be taking my clothes off right now.

Christina Harlin - Possessed

In my experience, people who want to keep their painful injuries are using them as a crutch. They’re hiding from something.

Christina Harlin - Possessed

There’s a little angel on one of my shoulders saying that this is a wicked thing to do. Then there’s a little devil on my other shoulder, and she looks a lot like you.

Mark Strand - Blizzard of One

                And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been                    Had we not taken his place.

Tim Burton -

If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays with you.

Amanda M. Lyons - Wendy Won't Go

A figure held his daughter in the rocker. In the dim light he couldn’t make out the features, but the sight of anyone he didn’t know sitting in Wendy’s rocker with their daughter was enough to scare the shit out of him. Judging by the shuddering movements of his daughter’s body it had frightened her too, had caused her to mewl. He wanted to charge forward and reclaim his daughter, but he didn’t know what would happen if he acted so quickly. What would he do if it hurt her? What would he do if it

Shirley Jackson -

Everything is worse...if you think something is looking at you.

Peter Straub - Julia

I'm being haunted," she blurted out. "My dear," he cooed. "Turn yourself into a tourist attraction and charge admission.

Kate Chisman - Creep

The diamonds glinted under the glare of the chandelier and they looked like a thousand spider eyes

Alexei Maxim Russell - The New Homeowner's Guide to House Spirits

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.

Evangeline Walton - Witch House

Five actors playing allotted parts on a set stage; and now he, for whom no part had been written, had walked onto the stage unexpectedly, because one of the players had turned rebel, as she had once before. He threw everything out of focus, and them into a fever. The heat and intensity of these flying questions was enough to make a man with even partially trained clairvoyant faculties feel as if he sat in a room filled with flashing fireflies.He took warning and withdrew himself to a cold inner

Olivia Sudjic - Sympathy

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has resp

Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.

Alice Hoffman - The Dovekeepers

The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort.

Mrs. Oliphant - The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies

As Sandy and his wife warmed to the tale, one tripping up another in their eagerness to tell everything, it gradually developed as distinct a superstition as I ever heard, and not without poetry and pathos. How long it was since the voice had been heard first, nobody could tell with certainty. Jarvis's opinion was that his father, who had been coachman at Brentwood before him, had never heard anything about it, and that the whole thing had arisen within the last ten years, since the complete dis

Marcel Proust - Swann's Way

To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.

Melissa Jennings - Afterlife

I was haunting you, for so long, that I forgot that I became a ghost too.

Cormac McCarthy - Child of God

Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

E. Lockhart - We Were Liars

Suffer. You could say it means endure, but that's not exactly right

E. Lockhart - We Were Liars

suffer. you could say it means endure, but thats not exactly right

S. Kelley Harrell - Real Wyrd : A Modern Shaman's Roots in the Middle World

Engaging spirits isn’t an elitist ability or industry, it’s being active in the connection with All Things. It’s innate to us all.

S. Kelley Harrell - Real Wyrd : A Modern Shaman's Roots in the Middle World

Recognizing the connection to All Things, even in creepy moments, keeps me true to my animistic perspective. Finding growth from them is my choice.

Lisa Kleypas - Dream Lake

I hate you for all the years I 'll have to live without you. How can a heart hurt this much and still go on beating? How can I feel this bad without dying from it?I 've bruised my knees with praying to have you back. None of my prayers have been answered. I tried to send them up to heaven but they 're trapped here on earth, like bobwhites beneath the snow. I try to sleep and it's like I 'm suffocating.Where have you gone?Once you said that if I wasn't with you, it wouldn't be heaven.I can't let

Caitlín R. Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off t

Dana Michelle Burnett - Spiritus

Being dead does have its advantages.”-Alastor

Mrs. Oliphant - The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies

This was true enough, though it did not throw any light upon my perplexity. If we had heard of it to start with, it is possible that all the family would have considered the possession of a ghost a distinct advantage. It is the fashion of the times. We never think what a risk it is to play with young imaginations, but cry out, in the fashionable jargon, 'A ghost! - nothing else was wanted to make it perfect.' I should not have been above this myself. I should have smiled, of course, at the idea

Mrs. Oliphant - The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies

And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?''Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's wife, 'wha would investigate, as ye call it, a thing that nobody believes in? Ye would be the laughing-stock of a' the country-side, as my man says.''But you believe in it,' I said, turning upon her hastily. The woman was taken by surprise. She made a step backward out of my way.'Lord, Cornel, how ye frichten a body! Me! there's awful strange things in this world. An unlearned p

S. Kelley Harrell - Real Wyrd : A Modern Shaman's Roots in the Middle World

What we believe spirit visitors to be influences how they affect our lives. What we believe ourselves to be dictates how we react to them.

John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat

Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it.

John H. Alexander - Ghosts! Washington Revisited: The Ghostlore of the Nation's Capitol

The popular notion that ghosts are likely to be seen in a graveyard is not borne out by psychical research... A haunting ghost usually haunts a place that a person lived in or frequented while alive... Only a gravedigger's ghost would be likely to haunt a graveyard.

Judith Richardson - Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley

The main work of haunting is done by the living

Keith Blodgett -

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Something in my Room One Night -

I Only Speak in Blood. . .

Donna Lynn Hope -

His ghost comes back to be remembered. If he can’t be in this life, he procures a way to stay in orbit, and in that way, is never forgotten.

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Thomm Quackenbush - Flies to Wanton Boys

He wouldn’t be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries.

Alexei Maxim Russell - The New Homeowner's Guide to House Spirits

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 sp

Yiyun Li - from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.

Pamela K. Kinney - and the Tri-Cities Area

Hauntingly active as they share space with the living, the dead refuse to give up their undead residency.

James Caskey - The Haunted History of New Orleans: Ghosts of the French Quarter

Every town has ‘THAT house’: the one that once held dark secrets. You know the house… the one no one will purchase? The one whose walls have seen blood? The one that even birds avoid, and the darkened windows resemble empty eye sockets? There are furtive, yet insistent, whispers about ‘that’ house, murmurs that perhaps the house is best left alone, lest the dark stain left upon that abode’s history seep into our own present-day.

Caitlín R. Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.

Laura Lam - Shadowplay

So many men and women I have wronged, reduced to ghosts and shades. They surround me, but I can never let them know I regret what I have cost them, both the living and the dead.

Laura Lam - Shadowplay

Is it ghosts that truly haunt us, or the memory of our own mistakes that we wish we could undo?

Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim

I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....

Sue Grafton - M is for Malice

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.""I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly."Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.

Gene Wolfe -

I had turned my mind from my survival just as a man suffering from a deadly sickness manages by a thousand tricks never to look at death squarely; or rather, as a woman alone in a large house refrains from looking into mirrors, and instead busies herself with trivial errands, so that she may catch no glimpse of the thing whose feet she hears at times on the stairs.

Anthony Horowitz - Magpie Murders

Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn't say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognized Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.

Alexei Maxim Russell - The New Homeowner's Guide to House Spirits

The one plus side to demonic infestation is that children cannot be harmed by a demon. The sanctified aura of a child somehow repels the demon and they can only oppress them if the parent makes a contract allowing them to do so. Because they can be very clever in tricking people into agreeing to additional contracts, it is important to never converse with a demon. Either call in a priest or move out as soon as possible.

Rin Chupeco - The Girl from the Well

It is not in my nature to be interested in the living.But there are many things, I have found, that defy nature.

D.J. MacLennan - Frozen to Life: A Personal Mortality Experiment

So much time spent believingwe had ghosts in our machines has accustomed us to hauntingourselves.

Karl Marx - The Communist Manifesto

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?Tw

Hannah Moskowitz - Teeth

I wish we would all just fall apart so I wouldn't have to listen to the downfall happen, so slowly, so painfully.

David Mitchell - Ghostwritten

The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?

John Milton - Paradise Lost

Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure

Neil Gaiman - M Is for Magic

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.

James Herbert - Haunted

To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.

Eliza Granville - Gretel and the Dark

Older, but no wiser. Alas, our dreams continue to haunt us.

Shillpi S Banerrji -

You sit right next to me.Still you don't seem close to me.

Anurag Shourie -

There is nothing more agonising than the memory of good times when you are going through a difficult period in life. Life moves in only one direction - forward, but the memoirs of years gone by keep on haunting one’s soul till the time one is alive. Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon’s knife.

E.F. Benson - The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson

The subject dropped, and we sat on in the dusk that was rapidly deepening into night. The door into the hall was open at our backs, and a panel of light from the lamps within was cast out to the terrace. Wandering moths, invisible in the darkness, suddenly became manifest as they fluttered into this illumination, and vanished again as they passed out of it. One moment they were there, living things with life and motion of their own, the next they quite disappeared. How inexplicable that would be

Cormac McCarthy - or the Evening Redness in the West

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Carrie Ryan - The Forest of Hands and Teeth

There is a child - a baby - who long since kicked off her blankets. Her skin is ashen and her mouth open in a perpetual yet silent scream. She isn't old enough to roll over, to sit up, to climb. So she lies there kicking her fat legs against the footboard of the crib, eternally calling for her mother. For food. For flesh.

Frances Densmore -

Song after Battle:As the young men went by I was looking for him. It surprises me anew That he has gone. It is something To which I cannot be reconciled.Owls hoot at me. Owls hoot at me. That is what I hear In my life. Wolves howl at me. Wolves howl at me. That is what I hear In my life. -American Indian Songs

Marybeth Niederkorn - Small Town Tales: Volume 1

All in all, he thought it was a bad idea to get involved with the woman investigating his ex's possible suicide with intent to haunt.

Seré Prince Halverson - All the Winters After

During those times, only under piles of blankets did she feel substantial enough not to drift away; they kept her weighted down and a part of the world. But eventually her dog's persistence and her own strong will would win over, and she'd drag herself up from the thick bog and go back to her chores and her books, carving the missing days into the wall so they did not escape entirely.

Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

Come in! come in !’ he sobbed.‘Cathy, do come. Oh do -once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! hear me this time - Catherine, at last!

Sanhita Baruah -

There was this constant urge in me to tear my insides apart,I didn't know why. By the time I made my mind that it was impossible for meto do, there alighted the fear, haunting me with the words that rangconstantly in my head, "You're not brave enough".I didn't feel devastated, I felt the urge to be devastated.

Laura Whitcomb - A Certain Slant of Light

It was all real and blazing with detail. But I was shadow, light as mist, mute as the wallpaper.

Related Quote Subjects

haunting

moving