Haunts Quotes

I've finally gotten to a point in my life where I'm not afraid to speak. Where my shadow no longer haunts me. And I don't want to lose that freedom
not again. I can't go backward. I'd rather be shot dead screaming for justice than die alone in a prison of my own making. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist. That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step. She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who haunts him every night. ~ Anthony Doerr

An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in. ~ Paul Scott

The past always sort of haunts us and perhaps inspires us in some ways. ~ Jennifer Gilmore

An ancient memory of this love haunts all of us all the time, and beckons us to return. ~ Marianne Williamson

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself. ~ James Nachtwey

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a
local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous
thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over
the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a
revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body
heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the
unseen something that haunts the day - men in fedoras and sailors on
shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game. ~ Don DeLillo

Your law may be perfect, your knowledge of human affairs may be such as to enable you to apply it with wisdom and skill, and yet without individual acquaintance with men, their haunts and habits, the pursuit of the profession becomes difficult, slow, and expensive. ~ William Dunbar

One of the tours we had scheduled - the gaslight tour of Jack the Ripper's haunts, and on Halloween, no less, was canceled at the last minute. I recommend making sure you know the numbers of your tours and destinations so you can confirm your schedule along the way. Also, though we laugh about it now, the Eiffel Tower was on strike so we couldn't go up! ~ Andrea Phillips

Once, you were weak. That boy is long dead, but his Remnant still haunts you. Your weakness, Lindon, is thinking you are weaker than you are. ~ Will Wight

what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache? ~ Natasha Trethewey

Is," "is," "is" - the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

The doors to the world have been flung wide open, and the view that's available is staggering. Through technology and innovation, opportunities abound and possibilities seem endless. As inspiring as this can be, it can be equally overwhelming. The unintended consequence of abundance is that we are bombarded with more information and choices in a day than our ancestors received in a lifetime. Harried and hurried, a nagging sense that we attempt too much and accomplish too little haunts our days. ~ Gary Keller

There's nothing I want to relive - certainly not youth - and as for what's to come, I'm in no hurry. I watch my dogs. They throw themselves into everything they do; even their sleeping is wholehearted. They aren't waiting for a better tomorrow, or looking back at their glory days. Following their example, I'm trying to stick to the present. I'm not stranded here, I know where I've been; I can conjure up details of old haunts, even former states of mind. ~ Abigail Thomas

One lesson I got from Gandhi, 'Be the change you want to see,' haunts me. I just feel like I can't keep stomping around pointing the finger at BP when I am supporting the oil industry with my very own dollars and actions by buying their products, helping to pay their mortgage - plastic is from oil ... polyester, shower curtains. ~ Kristin Bauer Van Straten

To Solitude
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,
Nature's observatory - whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. ~ John Keats

The question haunts me still, and will, I suppose, until I join my parents in our final reunion. If the doctor had known what horrors awaited us not only at the cemetery that night, but in the days to come, would he still have insisted upon my company? Would he still have demanded that a mere child dive so deep into the well of human suffering and sacrifice - a literal sea of blood? And if the answer to that question is yes, then there are more terrifying monstrosities in the world than Anthropophagi. Monstrosities who, with a smile and a comforting pat on the head, are willing to sacrifice a child upon the altar of their own overweening ambition and pride. ~ Rick Yancey

The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says 'compulse' or 'impulse' as a verb. So why would you ever say 'repulse'? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I'm right. ~ Rob Sheffield

I love trawling through markets and vintage shops, and I make super-quick decisions about buying clothes. I also have my usual haunts I go to when in specific cities. ~ Alice Temperley

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. ~ John H. Alexander

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. ~ Studs Terkel

If the ghost that haunts the towns of Ypres and Arras and Albert is the staturory British Tommy, slogging with rifle and pack through its ruined streets to this well-documented destiny 'up the line', then the ghost of Boulogne and Etaples and Rouen ought to be a girl. She's called Elsie or Gladys or Dorothy, her ankles are swollen, her feet are aching, her hands reddened and rough. She has little money, no vote, and has almost forgotten what it feels like to be really warm. She sleeps in a tent. Unless she has told a diplomatic lie about her age, she is twenty-three. She is the daughter of a clergyman, a lawyer or a prosperous businessman, and has been privately educated and groomed to be a 'lady'. She wears the unbecoming outdoor uniform of a VAD or an army nurse. She is on active service, and as much a part of the war as Tommy Atkins. ~ Lyn Macdonald

I write because there is a night a day
dawn dusk shadow and light
and because there will always be seasons to dream

I write because in the beginning
is this planet which welcomes us

I write because the heart's swell
I have never forgotten the sea's rhythm

I also write for love and for the secret place
that haunts us ~ Amina Saïd

Love makes us sick, haunts our dreams, destroys our days. Love has killed more than any disease. ~ Rumplestiltskin

Listen, I know there were days you wanted to die

when the sky was so clear
you'd stand obnoxious underneath it
begging for stars to shoot you
just so you could feel at home.

I know about the ways you misplaced all the right words,
stockpiled every important social cue you ever missed
from the first time you learned you were wrong,
waited to make it right
once everyone stopped watching.

I know you let them beat up your beauty in bed
because redemption was still alive in you, howling relentless, gathering strength.
Felt like ecstasy when they pounded it out of you in the hard dark.
Those days of dead weather
got all strung together
and they spoke for you,
wore you down to telling everyone here it was a good life
so you could run back into the wails of your windfight.

I know the parts of your past that haunt you the most
are the days you weren't being yourself,
and I know that's why most of your past haunts you.
There were so many who found you out,
and they were right.
You were good.

So
un-
numb. ~ Buddy Wakefield

The religious leaders of the day had written the script for the Messiah. When Jesus announced he was the Messiah, the Pharisees and others screamed at him, "There is no Jesus in the Messiah script. Messiahs do not hang out with losers. Our Messiah does not break all the rules, Our Messiah does not question our leadership or threaten our religion or act so irresponsibly. Our Messiah does not disregard his reputation, befriend riffraff, or frequent the haunts of questionable people." Jesus' reply? "This Messiah does"! Do you see why Christianity is called "good news"? Christianity proclaims that it is an equal-opportunity faith, open to all, in spite of the abundance of playwrights in the church who are more than anxious to announce, "There is no place for you in Christianity if you [wear an earring/have a tattoo/drink wine/have too many questions/look weird/smoke/dance/haven't been filled with the Spirit/aren't baptized/swear/have pink hair/are in the wrong ethnic group/have a nose ring/have had an abortion/are gay or lesbian/are too conservative or too liberal]. ~ Mike Yaconelli

There's a ghost of a dream that you don't even try to shake free off because you're too in love with the way she haunts you. ~ Kamila Shamsie

Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life, Gilbert. The only thing that haunts me is that tale of the two who lived together fifty years and hated each other all that time. I can't believe they really did. Somebody has said that 'hate is only love that has missed its way.' I feel sure that under the hatred they really loved each other ... just as I really loved you all those years I thought I hated you ... and I think death would show it to them. I'm glad I found out in life. ~ L.M. Montgomery

It's funny how it only takes one person taking the time to show you they care for all that bad shit to not seem so bad for a moment. It's not like the demons go anywhere. What haunts you is still right there when you go back under, but that one gesture from one person can bring you to the surface for a second or two. And for a very long time, all I'd really needed was to come up for air. ~ David Joy

Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into
emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Stars I understand. They shed light and give life. It is the emptiness between that haunts me. ~ Greg Bear

The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best. ~ David Brainerd

I say love,
it knows no season.
It haunts the soul
eternally. ~ Dwight Yoakam

I am sick of old ghosts and I just want to feel safe again without the haunts of old vulnerabilities. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

I hold you in my mouth, in the words that contain you, in the unsaid and the haunts, in all the forms your name. ~ Gwen Calvo

Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that's lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won't be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival. ~ Jay McInerney

Poor, poor dear. Waiting must be so hard for you. I've heard Renier is an exquisite lover. All the Keepers gossip about him - the young Guardian who haunts their dreams." The smile on her glossy red lips was teasing and cruel. "But rules are rules. He's an alpha male, so his ... eagerness can be excused. Yours, however, is a disappointment. ~ Andrea Cremer

There is a pale, penetrating loneliness chiselled into every statue. A kind of loneliness made living. It haunts every rock and stone, every sinew of every room. A whispering, blistery loneliness. In a breath's moment, I swear I can hear voices, and at the exact same time, all I can hear is the deafening sound of utter nothingness. ~ Kate Macdonald

My laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house. ~ Walker Percy

Shadow inserted his coin. The drunk in the graveyard raised his bottle to his lips. One of the gravestones flipped over, revealing a grasping corpse; a headstone turned around, flowers replaced by a grinning skull. A wraith appeared on the right of the church, while on the left of the church something with a half-glimpsed, pointed, unsettlingly birdlike face, a pale, Boschian nightmare, glided smoothly from a headstone into the shadows and was gone. Then the church door opened, a priest came out, and the ghosts, haunts, and corpses vanished, and only the priest and the drunk were left alone in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own.

The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling, thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be.

"You know why I show that to you?" asked Czernobog.

"No."

"That is the world as it is. That is the real world. It is there, in that box. ~ Neil Gaiman

Take a moment in between breaths to let yourself see what's left to be seen, all the places you've been. Your old haunts. I pass by them every day, and after all these years I'll find myself wondering if they're just facades, like the saloon fronts and gun shops of an old ghost town set. As if I can poke my head inside the doors in the light of day and see nothing but framed out rooms and sandy floors, existing for no other reason than to give structure to who I used to be. ~ Anne Clendening

He moved to the next tree. "Our past can only follow us if we allow it to, Hawk."
"It doesn't follow me, Sensei, it haunts me," I said. "It lies in wait for me in the dark."
"A warrior cannot be haunted."
"What makes you think I am one?"
"Because when I look at you, I see nothing but a warrior who insists on wrapping herself in an unnecessary cocoon. ~ K.A. Emmons

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, "You're going to die, you know." However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

So what oppresses and scares us? It is our own thoughts, obviously, What overwhelms people when they are about to leaves friends, family, old haunts and their accustomed way of life? Thoughts. ~ Epictetus

Looking back at those early days in the band house, we can all see how important they were in helping us bond as a band. It could have gone so wrong. Danny and I had picked Harry and Dougie after, literally, two days of knowing them. We could have all hated each other. We could have found that we had nothing in common, or that we resented the time we spent with each other. In fact, we had such a lot of fun. We weren't yet famous or successful, but already we were having the time of our lives. Even when we hit the big time, we didn't want to go out to clubs or celebrity haunts. Not our scene. For us, the best thing about being in a band was being in a band, doing band stuff - not all the trappings that went with it. We liked working on our music, and we liked hanging out together. All this meant we gelled more than most bands ever have the opportunity or inclination to do. Within a couple of months of moving into the band house, I had three new best friends. Their names were Danny, Harry and Dougie. No matter what the future held for us, our friendship was something we now know we could always rely on. ~ Tom Fletcher

It's the almost that haunts me. Even now. ~ Amy Matayo

The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town
to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. ~ James Lane Allen

But perhaps the most unsettling thing about a new church is the way the ghost of the old one haunts it. For better or worse, the faith of our youth informs our fears, our nostalgia, our reactions, and our suspicions. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them
And to know that they are the wounds that make love real.
His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.
I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again
I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too
and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality. ~ James Kavanaugh

All the old stories have it wrong, because it's not the ghost that haunts the house; it's the house that haunts the ghost. ~ Damien Echols

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. ~ Donna Tartt

Here again, the difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possibility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship, the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved act of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship. ~ Jacques Derrida

I really should not be so willing to interpret my own books as I seem to be this evening. But the blessing Ames gives Jack is an act of recognition that blesses Ames, too. He is profoundly moved that he has had the occasion to do it, that Jack accepted it, wanted it. I really do believe that all blessing is mutual, and that the moment of blessing is when people rise to the very beautiful seriousness of what they are. I feel that we ought to value ourselves and one another far more than we do, and I'm speaking theologically here, but also with an awareness that always haunts me, that we are the wonder of the universe, incomparably complex, brilliant, poignant - and perverse, of course. Our own overwhelming problem. But there are good grounds for awe in any human encounter. If we came anywhere near respecting the richness of this improbable life - hopes would flourish and blossom as they have never done before. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts. ~ Bob Kerrey

That down feeling, quitting, was far worse than suffering it out to the end, because that decision to quit haunts you and bleeds over into your outlook on everything else, just as not quitting buoys you for all else. ~ Diana Nyad

The past is a ghost that haunts us. Ghosts must banished. Lingering on the past is weakness, Lord Vader. ~ Paul S. Kemp

It is not the darkness of shadows: one that follows you, haunts you, terrifies you.
Instead, it consumes you, becomes you, weighs you down.
It IS you.
It is comforting. Familiar.
I have walked with it. Eaten with it. Loved with it. Smiled with it.
Yet I feel it destroying me.
Like cancer.
But I can't remove it. It stays inside of me, taunting me to kill it, myself, but it does not realize that this seduction keeps me alive. ~ Shannon Mullen

Fear is a beast that haunts darkest of nights
And swallows our minds one by one
But hope is a light that takes root in the heart
And can grow to be strong as the sun ~ Lisa Lueddecke

That word sassy - it haunts me. I keep getting the sassy thing. ~ Wanda Sykes

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research "childhood."

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher's heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises "adolescence." The feeling haunts people all their lives.

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. ~ Michael Chabon

Don't talk. Don't sputter out a solitary protest or it will be your last. Take me to them."

"Who the f**k are you?"

He palmed the man's forehead and slammed his skull against the wall. "I said don't talk, and you want to do as I say. I'm the one thing monsters like you and your kind fear. I'm what haunts your nightmares and hunts you in the darkness. ~ G.S. Jennsen

The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries
the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America's theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses
especially the grander ones
have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies. ~ Christopher Isherwood

You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. ~ Oscar Wilde

From the beginning, the gospel message has had a profound eschatological component. The compelling challenge for every person is the inevitability of the ultimate catastrophe of death. It haunts us particularly as we age and realize as parents die and out peers depart that we are, in some sense, "next." Man was not created to die. God placed eternity in his heart and an immortal spirit that cannot comprehend the end of life. Fear of our mortality lurks in the background of our lives, dampening our joys, and in sober moments, bringing us to an awareness of our overwhelming fragility. Much of modern life is an attempt to live as though we will be here forever. It is a fantasy of denial, supported by the pleasures of the moment, which collectively serve as a narcotic, dulling the awareness of death's certainty and near proximity.
The message of the gospel is the message of life for us, a life out of death, provided in the person of our substitute, Jesus Christ. As the only one qualified to face the foe, He took all that death could give – energized by Satan's rage – and came out the victor, providing immortality to all who would believe in Him. His victory was not simply the means of our return to Eden's joys, with their attendant vulnerability to the possibility of yet another fall. It closed the door forever to another intrusion of sin and death by giving perfect, sinless immortality to those who are His own. He gave them the absolute promise of eternal perfection, the u ~ John E. Hartman

He that divines the secret of my music is freed from the unhappiness that haunts the whole world of men. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

I'm sure a handful of people can relate to that experience of having some kind of romantic encounter - the event of love - which they just can't shake. They take it with them, despite their own desire, and it continually haunts them, and there's nothing to be done about it. That's a true rarity. ~ John Maus

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair ... which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney

The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest, by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason;
But still the heart doth need a language; still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names;
Spirits or gods that used to share this earth
With man as with their friend; and at this day
'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
And Venus who brings every thing that's fair. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Never mind, he answered; and, slinging his weapon over his shoulder, strode off down the gorge and so away into the heart of the mountain to the haunts of the wild beasts. Amongst them all there was none so fierce and so dangerous as himself. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I've lived to se my longings die
I've lived to se my longings die:
My dreams and I have grown apart;
Now only sorrow haunts my eye,
The wages of a bitter heart.
Beneath the storms of hostile fate,
My flowery wreath has faded fast;
I live alone and sadly wait
To see when death will come at last.
Just so, when the winds in winter moan
And snow descends in frigid flakes,
Upon a naked branch, alone,
The final leaf of summer shakes! ... ~ Alexander Pushkin

What is love but a nostalgia for someones history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers? ~ Darcey Steinke

Stephen kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Stephen's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day. ~ Sara Teasdale

Sweet memory, wafted by the gentle gale,
Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail,
To view the fairy haunts of long-lost hours,
Blest with far greener shades, far fresher flowers. ~ Samuel Rogers

I felt my mother about the place. I don't think she haunts me, but I wouldn't put it past her. ~ Julie Walters

I looked like a corpse, and not a particularly fresh corpse at that. ~ Emmett Spain

Why had I chosen the path of the law? And why law of the kind that seemed to be connected to an unspoken family history? 'What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,' the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham wrote of the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent. The invitation from Lviv was a chance to explore those haunting gaps. ~ Philippe Sands

The past is a funny thing, Ruby. It is nature's most underestimated ghost. It is still very much alive. Its heart still beats, it haunts. And it is always impacting, always dictating the future, which eventually becomes the past. You see, it multiplies, this enigma. It grows larger and larger until at the end, it swallows your entire life. Every day, every moment becomes the past. ~ Amy Gail Hansen

Sometimes, success almost haunts you. You want to be the best at everything you do and know you have to work hard. ~ Katarina Witt

I cannot concern myself with the intolerable affections and frivolous actions of a cruel, selfish, and litigious society. I must treasure the invisible muteness and inherent intelligence that nature blessed me with at birth. I shall endeavor to find beauty in living, striving, suffering, and dying in nature's glorious wonderland of grasslands, forest, rivers, and seas situated under an of infinite canopy of glittering stars. Perhaps when I reach the end of this long scroll I will finally leave behind me the tragic sense of ignobly that haunts my nights and begin living in a world filled with infinite sunshine and boundless delight. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance. Only the recognition of damsel, horse or fly and the assumption of damsel, horse or fly; and so with dreams and beyond, for what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness. ~ Mervyn Peake

Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far, The voice divine of human loyalty. ~ George Eliot

when I am in a foreign city and feel even the slightest bit disoriented, I can feel the panic of that day on the Hong Kong street begin to rise in my chest. My story of being lost ended quickly and happily, but it still haunts me. ~ Katherine Paterson

It is a strange time, my dear.
A novel virus haunts our streets.
Days feel like weeks,
weeks like months.
We're blasted with new news every second -
yes and then no and then yes and no,
feeding our primal panic
to hoard goods and leave shelves
breadless, riceless.
They tell us the pandemic
makes all equal - the poor and very rich -
then why are the poor poorer
and the rich profiting?

It is a strange time, my dear.
Army men are marching our streets.
They force us to stay inside,
threaten and arrest
for a walk in the park.
They wage small wars against us,
but this battle began long ago.
The elite technocrats are crowing
in their silicone valleys
as corporations grow
and small businesses fold
with mountains of debt -
the centre cannot, will not, hold!

It is a strange time, my dear.
Mainstream media reports
the world has never been safer
as they terrorise the chambers
of our minds.
This stress, this anxiety
is killing our immunity.
But we must do it all for the elderly -
or so they say!
When have they ever cared for our elders?
When have they ever cared for our vulnerable?
We go to bed dreaming of toilet paper
while they dismantle the world economy.
Family businesses go bust
all so we can protect the people,
but only the pe ~ Kamand Kojouri

What happens in the past, is in the past. But don't be surprised if it comes back and haunts you. ~ Nicholas Sparks

A question that always haunts me. Why can't people just be real? It's easier being real than pretend being real. Give yourself a chance. ~ Manasa Rao

Eighty-two years later, the sound of her crying still haunts me. If only I had paid closer attention to why she was crying instead of simply trying to quiet her. If only I had paid closer attention. ~ Christina Baker Kline

seeking a place to rest my head without shame
seeking a father who never worried about me
seeking a mother whose body never hurt
seeking the piano that could play itself
seeking a person who wants to meet me on a train
seeking a person who knows where estonia is
seeking my sense of self i never found–seeking

an end to all of this. ~ Jessie Knoles

Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies,
And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise. ~ Alexander Pope

a bright star
haunts me,
as I fell in love
with the sunsets
on a breezy rooftop ~ Bremer Acosta

For men know not what the nature of the soul is; whether it is engendered with us, or whether, on the contrary, it is infused into us at our birth, whether it perishes with us, dissolved by death, or whether it haunts the gloomy shades and vast pools of Orcus. ~ Lucretius

A stranger lies behind my eyes,
I know not what he wants;
sells me dreams, tells me tales,
then with the truth, he haunts. ~ Akash Mandal

You're not the only one who calls them that; the other Downworlders do the same," said Will. "I discovered that fact while investigating the symbol. I must have carried that knife through a hundred Downworld haunts, searching for someone who might recognize it. I offered a reward for information. Eventually the name of the Dark Sisters came to my ears."
"Downworld?" Tessa echoed, puzzled. "Is that a place in London?"
"Never mind that," said Will. "I'm boasting of my investigative skills, and I would prefer to do it without interruption. Where was I? ~ Cassandra Clare

In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen. ~ Nicole Mones

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear. ~ Shirley Temple

After nineteen hundred years the Sermon on the Mount still haunts men. They may praise it, as Mahatma Gandhi did; or like Nietzsche, they may curse it. They cannot ignore it. Its words are winged words, quick and powerful to rebuke, to challenge, to inspire. And though some turn from it in despair, it continues, like some mighty magnetic mountain, to attract to itself the greatest spirits of our race (many not Christians), so that if some world-wide vote were taken, there is little doubt that men would account it "the most searching and powerful utterance we possess on what concerns the moral life."2 ~ Charles L. Quarles

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.
Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.
For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

There were two kinds of storms, Alice thought. One was a friendly kind that you could enjoy watching out the window with a cup of tea. It crashed around in the sky with theatricality but no real malice.
This storm was the other, the killing kind. There are horrors that exist in the night, the bitter wind said, horrors that only children and demons can see. There are horrors that exist in the mind as well, that only the individual can bear witness to. The winter wind sang of things that the mind did not quite remember but that fear never forgot, filled as people are with the haunts and tragedies that make up the shadows of their lives. We can't endure them, the wind whispered, for when the light and warmth are truly taken we are left shivering naked in the dark. Then we hear a nearby husky chuckle that tells us we are prey. ~ Thea Harrison

The greatest fear that haunts this city is a suitcase bomb, nuclear or germ. Many people carry small gas masks. The masses here seem to be resigned to the inevitable, believing an attack of major proportions will happen. ~ David Wilkerson

When Kirsten carried out a portable defibrillator the size of a breadbox, I very nearly went into cardiac arrest. Which, let's face it, would probably fall under the category of 'most ironic thing ever'. ~ Emmett Spain