Death Ghosts Quotes

Enough regret can crush any man, living or dead. ~ Marlo Berliner

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

The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead
young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is
no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back.
They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their
jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, "How is it with you, my
child?" but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they
whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to
see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath
the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little
vests he has. They love to do these things.

What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their
child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him,
and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to
room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate
souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that
go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are
invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. I know
of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early home to
pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair
by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face
appear. She always looked at him very vindictively, and then
vanished. Strange things happened in this house. Windows were < ~ J.M. Barrie

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us. ~ Jim Carroll

This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don't mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one. ~ J.D. Salinger

Death is on a scar filled with shadows and temptations. ~ D.K. Mckenzie

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

Everything that's loved lives. ~ Mira Grant

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

Most people would probably call me a ghost. I am, after all, dead. But I don't think of myself that way. It wasn't so long ago that I was alive, you see. I was only eighteen. I had my whole life in front of me. Now I suppose you could say I have all of eternity before me. I'm not sure exactly what that means yet. I'm told everything's going to be fine. But I have to wonder what I would have done with my life, who I might have been. That's what saddens me most about dying--that I'll never know. ~ Christopher Pike

We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us. ~ Liam Callanan

Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak. ~ Kelly Moran

It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already.
That's right
you heard me: dead again already.
I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that? ~ Jim Butcher

The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner. ~ Catherynne M Valente

You fuck - you ate my cat! ~ Kendare Blake

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

Hope is a corpse.

A dead thing, watching you suffer with black empty eyes.

Any comfort it might have offered, long since gone to the grave. ~ Andrew Cull

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

Some evenings, he describes the waking world beyond here. It almost makes me grateful I'm dead. ~ Gwendolyn Kiste

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see. ~ Lauren Oliver

If you were picky about who you worked with in the Wild North, you'd be quickly left with no one to choose. You could try to pick the best of them, but you'd have to dig them up first. ~ Dean F. Wilson

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

None of the dead come back. But some stay. ~ John Of Patmos

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man. ~ E. M. Forster

He imagined that in his estate of eternal night he might somehow have already halved the distance to death. That the transition for him could not be so great for the world was already at some certain distance and if it were not death's terrain he encroached upon in his darkness then whose? ~ Cormac McCarthy

Most people think of death as the end, when in fact, death can be the beginning. ~ Gabrielle

Man alone, it seems, lives all his life in the knowledge of death. And yet there is more to life than merely waiting for death. For life to have meaning, there must be a purpose. A man must pass something on - otherwise he is useless. "For most men that purpose revolves around marriage and children ~ David Gemmell

Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive. ~ Sally Mann

This world is so thick with ghosts it's a wonder anyone can breathe. ~ Leah Raeder

The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I'll never tire of her warm smile or bright green eyes. She's mine, in sickness and in health, till death do us part-scratch that- even in the afterlife she's mine and I'll fight any spirity-ghost bastard that attempts to fuck this up. ~ Skyla Madi

You are as the yellow leaf.
The messengers of death are at hand.
You are to travel far away.
What will you take with you?
You are the lamp
To lighten the way.
Then hurry, hurry.
When your light shines
Without impurity or desire
You will come into the boundless country.
Your life is falling away.
Death is at hand.
Where will you rest on the way?
What have you taken with you?
You are the lamp
To lighten the way.
Then hurry, hurry.
When your light shines purely
You will not be born
And you will not die. ~ Gautama Buddha

Fear of death and the desire to live on, somehow, if only through our children. Or our grandchildren. Quixotic quest for immortality. It's sad and heroic and doomed - all at the same time. ~ Will Ferguson

I think it's very interesting that [doctors] privilege the self that is saying, "I don't want to die," but want to discount the self that said, "I want to allow natural death in such a situation." ~ Katy Butler

[From Pale Horse, Pale Rider]

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . . ~ Katherine Anne Porter

But above all he must refrain from seizing the property of others, because a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

What is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? ~ Kahlil Gibran

Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine! ~ Charles Dickens

Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet. ~ Allen Ginsberg

Death is only an old door/Set in a garden wall. ~ Nancy Byrd Turner

I'm not doing anything that hasn't been done before, you know...dying, it's been done to death. ~ Sondra Lynn

Winning is an abstract concept. There is no winning in real life. Winning is just a device for storytellers to conveniently end a tale, but everyone knows that real stories - real lives - only end in death. But the dead don't win anything except the release from the never-ending game, the never-ending race. There is no winning, but that doesn't mean you have to lose. You can't lose if you refuse to play, if you refuse to fight, if you refuse the race the sun day after day. Don't surrender, because to surrender is to lose. Don't give up, because to give up is to lose. When you refuse to fight, there is no surrender. When you refuse to race the sun, you can finally stop to appreciate the light it brings to the earth each and every day. ~ Ilia Bera

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all. ~ William Shakespeare

I wasn't expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins. ~ Charles Stross

Right around the time he hits his middle forties, a man starts giving serious thought to dying well. In his sleep, in his own bed, or in the course of a street fight meant to settle something meaningful. His end doesn't have to be poignant, just devoid of dignity. You wouldn't think that would be too much to ask.

But how a man leaves this world, much like the way he comes into it, is almost never his own call to make, so evil men die on satin sheets in 400-dollar-a-night hotel rooms, while good ones breathe their last lying face down in cold, dark alleyways, their bodies growing stiff and blue on beds of rain-soaked newspaper. ~ Gar Anthony Haywood

It seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death."
"Sure and show me the person's road that does not lead to death. we try to divert our attention, to pretend 'tisn't so, but the very air we breathe is vulture's breath. Please don't be insinuatin' your man is morbid. I dwell on death in order to defeat it. ~ Tom Robbins

How long does a person wait before they let go of the one they love? ~ Paige Toon

I know that I might die but that seems a happier end than being without you and anyway it seems to me that looking in the face of hard things and still being able to move forward even when the end includes grave danger and the possibility of death is the mark of a man. ~ Anna Godbersen

Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment that I am dying, and that everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer "yes" to both of these, then you really understand impermanence. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

I always heard 'whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger' growing up. How so very foolish. In fact, what doesn't kill you is only delaying the inevitable. ~ Jeremy Caldwell

The death of the spirit which threatens every man unless he is conscious of the danger and has a real purpose which can keep it alive and enable it to thrust its way through the choking weeds and thorns to the air and to the sun ~ Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper

Such is true joy's absolute certainty,
Its slow lit fuse that burns holes
In the shabby shroud of death forever. ~ Scott Hastie

Nobody ever got anything from God on the grounds that he deserved it. Haven fallen, man deserves only punishment and death. So if God answers prayer it's because God is good. From His goodness, His lovingkindness, His good-natured benevolence, God does it! That's the source of everything. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

I cannot tell you ... my little one. No man can tell you. No ... I cannot answer you, for nothing I could say would be the truth. The truth is beyond us, and is not in us. We go forward in faith. That is all.
Nobody can tell us why the Son of Man had to go. He was Prince of Light. He could have ruled the world. But He was crucified, and when men would have fought for Him, He told them to put up their swords. He allowed a rabble to crucify Him. Why did He die in that way when He could have chosen any? To save us, we know. But why did He die in only that way? It was ordained? Then dare we say that Dilys was ordained to die as she did? ~ Richard Llewellyn

The death of Garang has unfortunately unleashed emotions of anger; some genuine, others cultivated by elements who wanted to pit one group of Sudanese against another. ~ Salva Kiir Mayardit

[T]here is no greater strengthener of sin, and destroyer of the soul, than Scripture misapplied (317). ~ Richard Baxter

I am deeply saddened by the death of my dear friend, Dudley Moore. ~ Liza Minnelli

I've thought about it more than a thousand times. It was a thousand times worse, so I suppressed it, I suppressed it to death. The moment that I heard that Meahri was leaving, I thought the world was ending because at that moment, I was full of regret. I was avoiding, not thinking, and pretending it wasn't what my heart was hoping for earlier. I'm sorry, because I've made Meahri cry so many times. I'll do well. I'll take care of her forever. Tae-sang, this is my first and last request of you. Just this once, forgive me. ~ Yoon Sang-hyun

We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself. ~ Albert Schweitzer

Eight: the age of exploration, of ghosts and secret forays; the age at which a mystery lurks behind every curtain and every armoire opens into a magical world, which you may enter at any time, but who knows when you will return. ~ Carmen Posadas

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually. ~ Billy Graham

Why worry one's head over a thing that is inevitable? Why die before one's death? ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The god of war is impartial: he hands out death to the man who hands out death. ~ Homer

He is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead... ~ William Faulkner

phoenix-
your back to
the mirror-

you are the most
immortal death ~ Banoo Zan

Where were the stars now, whose progress his mother had followed so religiously? Where was the God that she sometimes turned to in her weakest moments? He remembered gazing at the sky in wonder as a child. That was where they told him the dead went. They became stars in the night sky, an insurmountable distance away. ~ Shitij Sharma