Ghost Roads Quotes

Homecomer, hitcher, phantom rider,
White lady wants what's been denied her,
Gather-grim knows what you fear the most,
But best keep away from the crossroads ghost.

Talk to the poltergeist, talk to the haunt,
Talk to the routewitch if it's what you want.
Reaper's in the parlor, seizer's in a host,
But you'd best keep away from the crossroads ghost.

- common clapping rhyme among the ever-lasters of the twilight ~ Seanan McGuire

Delhi is excellent. Everything looks so beautiful. In Bombay, we don't have such beautiful roads, spacious places, and you cannot have the luxury of having houses and bungalows. You have to live in little pokey flats and cost of living is extremely high in Mumbai. Delhi has a lot that people keep preserving ... a lot of which is what Delhi is about. ~ Bipasha Basu

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

Ford put a hand to his head. "Back up. Back up!" he cried. "You're too close."
Heart pounding, I looked at the eight feet between us and pressed into the fridge.
"I think he meant for the ghost to back up," Jenks said dryly. ~ Kim Harrison

I tell you once and for all -
in front of the angel pictures
on the wall, that I am not a host
to load-bearing ghosts or heady
entities, and if I was ever holy, I have fallen far
into the dense atmosphere of the living. ~ Kristen Henderson

I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of a keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all likelihood see it familiarly, as I might say, again. I was on the lookout for it as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light and ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There's no doubt that I was much uplifted. I couldn't get over the distinction conferred on me, the exception - in the way of mystic enlargement of vision - made in my favour.
("Sir Edmund Orme") ~ Henry James

I end up leaning on my sword for a moment, after exerting almost the last of my energy to take down one of the weakest Vampyres. Must be nice to be a Van Helsing, who can carry on idle chit-chat, while fighting like it's a day job.

"I told you to feed more often - "

"I don't want to hear 'I told you so's' right now, you smug prat. I want you to kiss me," I tell him.

"I'll fucking die first," he assures me, quickly knocking the head off the Vampyre, who damn near crept up on me.

After Vance does some fancy sword skills, clearly showing off, five Vampyres lose their head, leaving only two.

I stick behind Vance, shamelessly using the sword-happy Van Helsing as a shield.

"Should we discuss the ghost fanning herself right now?" I ask, as Emily slides up next to us, moving with us toward the remaining Vampyres.

"Pssst," the ghost stage whispers. "The threat's over. You can be cool again."

I step out from behind Vance, adjust my jacket, and ignore the fucking ghost who thinks I have pride or something. ~ Kristy Cunning

Like a ghost that dances on the tip of a lit cigarette,
I know what romance is, but it hasn't happened yet.
Watch it floating up to heaven only knows,
Disappearing before you get too close-
It's only smoke. You might say a flame was burning, only smoke--
but my heart is more discerning,
I keep dreaming of a fire
But when I wake up to the cold--
It's only smoke.

Eyes are hypnotizing when they hold you within their embrace.
Words are mezmerizing even when they've got nothing to say.
The game is charming in an empty kind of way.
What's the harm in asking me to play?
It's only smoke. You might say a flame was burning, only smoke--
but my heart is more discerning,
I keep dreaming of a fire
But when I wake up to the cold--
It's only smoke. ~ Jane Monheit

The key fob played the first bar of Für Elise as I locked the car up. I hoped that Beethoven's ghost was out there somewhere, making the night hideous for the managing director of Ford's. ~ Mike Carey

Funny. The woman was funny. Add that up with cute as a button, smart as a tack, and surprisingly tough underneath that cupcake exterior, and Frank understood why Ghost went all Cro-Magnon around her. ~ Julie Ann Walker

Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own. ~ Virginia Woolf

I love you." She sucks in a deep breath. "But I need you to love me. The woman standing in front of you. The woman your wife has grown into. I don't know how else we can move forward. I can't live with her ghost between us. ~ Carian Cole

This Proto-Indo-European term ghosti (from which we get the words guest, host and ghost) referred to a kind of unspoken etiquette, a notion that on seeing strangers on the horizon, rather than choose to fell them with spears or sling-shots, instead we should take the risk of welcoming them across our threshold – on the chance that they might bring new notions, new goods, fresh blood with them.

Over time this word-idea evolved into the Greek xenia – ritualised guest–host friendship, an understanding that stitched together the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. ~ Bettany Hughes

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.
In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure. ~ Mark Doty

See, I think there are roads that lead us to each other. But in my family, there were no roads - just underground tunnels. I think we all got lost in those underground tunnels. No, not lost. We just lived there. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

Perhaps not passionate but comfortable. We could have gone on like that forever and then you came, the rambling man, with all these expatriate philosophies that we've outgrown ourselves over the past 20 years. This is really not our problem, Dick. You're leading a ghost town life, infecting everyone who comes near you with a ghost disease. Take it back, Dick. We don't need it. ~ Chris Kraus

We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage. We will welcome summer's ghost. ~ Henry Rollins

If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the State. ~ John Dos Passos

The truth is that men were simply giving up the ghost. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Baptism is a sign to God, to angels, and to heaven that we do the will of God, and there is no other way beneath the heavens whereby God hath ordained for man to come to Him to be saved, and enter into the kingdom of God, except faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, and baptism for the remission of sins, and any other course is in vain; then you have the promise of the gift of the Holy Ghost. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

As she followed her dog through the side roads back towards Darkshines, her thick boots started to feel leaden, her legs prickly and sore; the pavement was on fire, intent on burning her to ash, just as the deep night sky above looked to wrap itself around her and take her away. ~ Russell Mardell

So much time spent believing
we had ghosts in our machines has accustomed us to haunting
ourselves. ~ D.J. MacLennan

We are merely ghost flowers under the shade of the moon
Many shades of secret sorrows blanket our eyes
We spend our lives and our souls
Searching-
Longing-
Waiting-
For a little light to shine and heal our broken halo's ~ Steven A. Williams

I was far away from home, haunted & tired with travel, in a room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, the creak of the old wood, footsteps upstairs & all the sad sounds.
I looked at the cracked high ceiling & really didn't know who I was for about 15 strange seconds.
I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger & my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
I was halfway at the dividing line between the East of my youth & the West of my future. ~ Jack Kerouac

But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a a sentence that I could read about my mother. All objects and events on our island, every single thing that you could see with your eyes, were like clues that I could use to reinvent her: would our mom love this thing, would she hate it? For a second I luxuriated in a real hatred of my brother. ~ Karen Russell

I come from a long line of serial embellishers. Sometimes a good story's got a ghost in it; sometimes a panther chases my Uncle Bill and Fred Price home from a coon hunt. ~ Tony Earley

I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that. ~ Lennie James

If we are not careful, we shall leave our children a legacy of billion dollar roads, leading nowhere except to other congested places like those they left behind. ~ Omar Bradley

Plumes of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, elegant fountains and twisting snow devils, shapes of veiled Arab women and ghost riders dissolving in white fume. ~ Annie Proulx

It would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads, but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads. ~ Andy Borowitz

Okay, you're right about that. But this whole ghost thing's irritating."
"Park benches are irritating to you in some moods."
"Depends on whether or not I want to sit down. ~ Nora Roberts

And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortal will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on. ~ Anne Rice

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. ~ Jacqueline E. Smith

Think of music as being a great snarl of a city [ ... ]. In the years I spent living there, I came to know its streets. Not just the main streets. Not just the alleys. I knew shortcuts and rooftops and parts of the sewers. Because of this, I could move through the city like a rabbit in a bramble. I was quick and cunning an clever.
Denna, on the other hand, had never been trained. She knew nothing of shortcuts. You'd think she'd be forced to wander the city, lost and helpless, trapped in a twisting maze of mortared stone. But instead, she simply walked through the walls. She didn't know any better. Nobody had ever told her she couldn't. Because of this, she moved through the city like some faerie creature. She walked roads no one else could see, and it made her music wild and strange and free. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

A ghost curled like a blue snail inside her chest, and it was so tiny! It burned through the lace of her old-fashioned dress like a second heart. A musical staff wound in a thorny crown around the Spiritist's forehead, so that notes ran down her cheeks in a loose mask of song. Her eyelids were blacked out
and I saw this again and again in nightmares about my sister. Her eyelids had the polish of acorns. But her ears: that was the truly scary part. Great fantails of indigo and violet lights spiraled into her earlobes in an ethereal funnel
what the book called the Inverted Borealis. The caption read: 'A ghost sings its way deeply inside the Spiritist. ~ Karen Russell

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost ~ Eleanor Catton

What is it about adults that makes them all just say the same things? Like they all studied the same book about grown-up-ness, memorizing phrases like, *Does it make it right?* and *Be the bigger person*" -Ghost ~ Jason Reynolds

Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,
I tread day and night such roads. ~ Walt Whitman

A politician who has no compassion is nothing but an evil apparition; he is just a ghost, not a real man! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage. ~ Jessica Knoll

If a ghost was a recording of a memory, as some believed, and Wasp pulled back the curtain from the third alcove on the right, she might find the wide-eyed bloody-handed ghost of herself, hugging her knees and shivering, trying to unremember the sound of her little dagger sinking hilt-deep into girlflesh, the day she earned her name. ~ Nicole Kornher-Stace

Am I better off living through death,
Or dying an invisible ghost?
Am I better off speaking in silence,
Or screaming so loud no one will hear?
I fake a smile,
But it's killed by you,
I fake a soul,
But that dies, too.
So I fake my life,
What else can I do?
Take me in, spit me out,
And I scream and scream and shout,
But you can't hear my pain,
My blood's nothing but a worthless stain.
I fake a smile,
But it's killed by you.
I fake a soul,
But that dies, too.
So I fake my life,
What else can I do?
And if one day I wake up gone,
Maybe people will see through,
But until then the lies will rule.
And sometimes I think
I'm better off dead,
But then I realize
I already am. ~ Olivia Rivers

A stick won't stick to a wall, so why is it called a stick? Likewise, why aren't love and ghost the same word? Both are dead and invisible. ~ Jarod Kintz

I coughed and choked, and drowned on moonlight, which tastes like butter and steel and salt and mist. And then, just like that, just when I thought she was going to kill me, suck the air out of my lungs and make me a ghost too, she lifted her hand, and ... faded away. ~ April Genevieve Tucholke

The world of shadows and superstition that was Victorian England, so well depicted in this 1871 tale, was unique. While the foundations of so much of our present knowledge of subjects like medicine, public health, electricity, chemistry and agriculture, were being, if not laid, at least mapped out, people could still believe in the existence of devils and demons. And why not? A good ghost story is pure entertainment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that ghost stories began to have a deeper significance and to become allegorical; in fact, to lose their charm. No mental effort is required to read 'The Weird Woman', no seeking for hidden meanings; there are no complexities of plot, no allegory on the state of the world. And so it should be. At what other point in literary history could a man, standing over the body of his fiancee, say such a line as this:

'Speak, hound! Or, by heaven, this night shall witness two murders instead of one!'

Those were the days.

(introduction to "The Weird Woman") ~ Hugh Lamb