Phantom Quotes

the phantom of social justice tormented him. ~ Victor Hugo

Who cares about an enlightened phantom? Only the other phantoms. It always needs a community of ignorant ideas and one of them maybe is a master -ignorant. The master of ignorance! There are no masters of knowledge. How can there be a master of knowledge ? How can there be a master of Heart? You can only be a master of shit. ~ Karl Renz

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach and which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the Angels dove off and flew into infinity. ~ Jack Kerouac

Every so often I was overwhelmed by a phantom pain that cut through me like a knife. I was certain that if I looked down I would find blood all over, like the knife I once held in my hands, but it was all in my mind. ~ Gail Tsukiyama

Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness. ~ Charles Bukowski

Christians believe themselves to be the aristocracy of heaven upon earth, they are admitted to the spiritual court, while millions of men in foreign lands have never been presented. They bow their knees and say they are 'miserable sinners,' and their hearts rankle with abominable pride. Poor infatuated fools! Their servility is real and their insolence is real but their king is a phantom and their palace is a dream. ~ William Winwood Reade

Get up to turn your chair away from her
a few degrees. And look at me. I may
be someone else's longed-for phantom. Pour
me some more wine; tell me the story; listen:
it's a dreary wish to want the whole world ghostless. ~ Elizabeth Hadaway

What I got in exchange for my false prosperity was only a fearful destruction, a cold mask, and a pitch-dark castle like a mausoleum that the Phantom made. ~ Mizuki Nomura

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen's plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.
From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear- guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm; they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

Just follow that line forever," said the Mathemagician, "and when you reach the end, turn left. There you'll find the land of Infinity, where the tallest, the shortest, the biggest, the smallest, and the most and least of everything are kept."
"I don't have that much time," said Milo anxiously. "isn't there a quicker way?"
"Well, you might try this flight of stairs," he suggested, opening another door and pointing up."It goes there, too. ~ Norton Juster

Subhuti, someone might fill innumerable worlds with the seven treasures and give all away in gifts of alms, but if any good man or any good woman awakens the thought of Enlightenment and takes even only four lines from this Discourse, reciting, using, receiving, retaining and spreading them abroad and explaining them for the benefit of others, it will be far more meritorious. Now in what manner may he explain them to others? By detachment from appearances-abiding in Real Truth. -So I tell you-
Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
When Buddha finished this Discourse the venerable Subhuti, together with the bhikshus, bhikshunis, lay-brothers and sisters, and the whole realms of Gods, Men and Titans, were filled with joy by His teaching, and, taking it sincerely to heart they went their ways. ~ Gautama Buddha

My auntie Anne took me to 'Phantom of the Opera' in London. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. ~ Lisa O'Hare

Because one day I'll leave you a phantom to lead you in the summer to join the black parade ~ Gerard Way

You can't tell the story of a 13-year-old boy who knows every lyric to 'Phantom of the Opera' without also referencing how much teasing he gets at school. ~ Tim Federle

A mask you ask? Optional I find!
Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them , peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls. ~ Hilary Mantel

Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she'd never see again.
She took every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind. ~ Sarah J. Maas

As long as man loves a phantom in the sky more than he loves his fellow man, there will never be peace upon this earth; so long as man worships a Tyrant as the "Fatherhood of God," there will never be a "Brotherhood of Man. ~ Joseph Lewis

Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn't he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man's land, between logical alternatives. I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists. ~ Robert Coover

Local grandmas came in and out of our clinic bringing homemade cookies and fudge, because nothing soothes phantom limb pain better than a homemade brownie. ~ Adele Levine

I had always been a fan of Nas, but I never met him. This is the one guy in the industry who's, like, the phantom rapper. ~ Kelis

I originally wanted to go into sports, but my first concert was KISS at the shooting of 'KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park.' The minute I saw Gene and Paul ... it was all over. I knew that's what I wanted to do. ~ Steven Adler

He raised his wine for a toast. "To the Exquisite Nightmare. ~ A.G. Howard

Then I made her understand that, where she was concerned, I was only a poor dog, ready to die for her. But that she could marry the young man she pleased because she had cried with me, and mingled her tears with mine. ~ Erik ~ Gaston Leroux

On Phantom ... I listened to the music while I was reading the script. And it had just blown me away. I really ... I was so excited about it. It's been a long time since I really got so excited about something. ~ Gerard Butler

If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me. ~ Gaston Leroux

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer. ~ Jane Hamilton

King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us. ~ Mason Cooley

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

One thing I definitely experienced up here (New York), that maybe I have to sort of cop to feeling defensive about, is since the election, people in my cohort, who are sensitive to portrayals of people in the movie as classist, have had no problem coming up with those sorts of [middle-American] stereotypes about a phantom real person they can blame for re-electing George Bush. ~ Philip Morrison

Every hunchback has his gypsy, each phantom his diva, and flames of passion consume witches and martyrs alike. For any lonely monster, tradition demands that one sacrificial soul seek immolation.
Ashe to ashes.
It remains the ultimate, transformative act of love. ~ Robert Dunbar

Like two old philosophers, Ashvin and James spoke of the ruin of their lives, their unfulfilled needs, their unanswered prayers and ultimately they were seduced by the phantom call to death by suicide its science, its poetry, its violence, its art. ~ Peter Akinti

We're prisioners of... things.Of who we are. ~ Jo Nesbo

As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind. ~ Anonymous

Phantom Conspiracy, ~ Nicholas Shakespeare

A moment well spent is the best accomplishment. Yesterday is a phantom and tomorrow a mirage. The only day worth living is this one. If we can do that wekl, the yesterdays and tomorrows take care of themselves ~ James Gurney

This web of time–the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries–embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures."

from "Garden of Forking Paths ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The water gripped her ankles with phantom hands, tugging her down. So she twisted, wrenching her arm free from the guard who held it. And so she pointed. One finger - at the king. Down down down that water wanted to pull her. But Nesta Archeron still pointed at the King of Hybern. A death-promise. A target marked. Hands shoved her into the water's awaiting claws. And Nesta Archeron laughed at the fear that crept into the king's eyes. Just before the water devoured her whole. ~ Sarah J. Maas

What tragedies, what passions, what crimes had surrounded the idyll of Raoul and his sweet and charming Christine! ... What had become of that wonderful, mysterious artist of whom the world was never, never to hear again? ... ~ Gaston Leroux

True beauty lies not upon gilded veneers,
But found in the soul within. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Callum didn't need a lifetime's experience of seeing ghosts to know that the creature was not of this world.
For a long moment, he stared at the phantom. What was it? And why was it following him? ~ Adam Slater

Hope you got your things together.'" I sang, stabbing a pillow with my spear. Feathers exploded into the air. "'Hope you are quite prepared to die!'" I spun in a dazzling whirl of lights, landed a killer back-kick on a phantom Shade, and simultaneously punched the magazine rack. "'Looks like we're in for nasty weather!'" I took a swan dive at a short, imaginary Shade, lunged up at a taller one -
- and froze.
Barrons stood inside the front door, dripping cool-world elegance.
I hadn't heard him come in over the music. He was leaning, shoulder against the wall, arms folded, watching me.
"'One eye is taken for an eye . . .'" I trailed off, deflating. I didn't need a mirror to know how stupid I looked. I regarded him sourly for a moment, then moved for the sound dock to turn it off. When I heard a choked sound behind me I spun, and shot him a hostile glare. He wore his usual expression of arrogance and boredom. I resumed my path for the sound dock, and heard it again. This time when I turned back, the corners of his mouth were twitching. I stared at him until they stopped.
I'd reached the sound dock, and just turned it off, when he exploded.
I whirled. "I didn't look that funny," I snapped.
His shoulders shook.
"Oh, come on! Stop it!"
He cleared his throat and stopped laughing. Then his gaze took a quick dart upward, fixed on my blazing MacHalo, and he lost it again. I don't know, maybe it was the brackets sticking out from the sides. ~ Karen Marie Moning

The autumn months are my domain:
Mirrored in pools my castles dream
Of wars long past and out of mind
From towers with ivy garlands twined

Weak and with regret the sun
Drowns itself in the sluggish green
Water that marble fountains weep;
Trees open their nests to the wings of sleep.

The wind like a phantom seems to roar,
Returned to die of love once more
At the false meeting of the ways
Where a temple rounds its dome in the haze.

Sometimes a child is heard to laugh
In the house of the priest, far off;
His lamp on the ledge of the window gleams
Much as the Holy Spirit flames.

Then nothing. Only a plane tree sways
Its crown of leaves in the dark that graze
Slowly and with a sound so alight
They barely ripple the silent night.

I am the lord of this domain.
Through halls of hollow, echoing
Armor, I haul the heavy shame
Of not being able to be king. ~ Stuart Merrill

I want you to take off the mask, Erik, do you hear me? I want you to take it off right now.
-Luciana ~ Susan Kay

When I was a vocalist, a lead singer in a rock band, I was a law student at the time. It wasn't a professional rock band, it was for fun. I was already way out of that by the time Phantom came along. Having to learn to sing, it was such duress, having to really try and get to such a quality. ~ Gerard Butler

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself. ~ Louis Aragon

The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favourite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come, And make their bed with thee. ~ William C. Bryant

When a man devotes himself body and spirit to a single object, if he has training and aptitude, no matter how mediocre he may be in ordinary affairs, he will produce something so nearly akin to a work of genius as to deceive half the judges who think themselves competent to decide between genius and talent.
("The Phantom Model") ~ Hume Nisbet

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real. ~ Alan Greenspan

To someone who has not had a parent stolen from them, I can only attempt to explain how it feels. It's like having part of yourself hacked off without warning. Afterwards, they become like a phantom limb: you're sure they're still present because you can feel them, you communicate with them, but you just can't see them. ~ Rusty Young

Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes?It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist. ~ A.S. Byatt

I snuggle closer to him in my sleep and my whimpering subsides to a contented sigh. It almost hurts to see Raffe closing his eyes and holding me the way a kid might hold a stuffed animal for comfort. I reach out my phantom hand to stroke his face. But of course, I can't feel him. I can only feel what the sword remembers. I run my hand along the lines of his neck and the muscles of his shoulder, anyway. Imagining the smooth warmth of him. Remembering the feeling of being held in his arms. ~ Susan Ee

The Jesus who makes everything okay for everyone is a phantom, a dream, not a real figure ... ~ Pope Benedict XVI

White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest ... White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Those words, that voice, had more power over me than any phantom ever could. ~ Richelle Mead

She never knows when it might strike. The rage. And when it does, she loses her grip on herself - literally. At times, she could swear she sees another self - shiny black phantom, faceless, as though clad in a bodysuit - leaping out of her, pulling the rest of her in its wake. Over the edge. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention - of barbarian invention - is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition - then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I'm not what you want
But I'm exactly what you need
Take a bite and feed
Your satisfaction guaranteed
I'm your sunshine, whoa
I'm gonna burn down your parade
I'm a shooting star
That wish you wished you never made ~ Natewantstobattle

We were quite naturally unhappy; feeling a definite need, unbearably keen at moments, which was never to be satisfied. But that was recognizable pain, and the sharp pang grew to be almost welcome in the midst of the sultry and opaque life which was not felt, had nothing real in it, and yet swam about us, and choked us and blinded us. All these tears and groans, reproaches and protestations of affection, high talk of duty and work and living for others, were doubtless what we should feel if we felt properly, and yet we had but a dull sense of gloom which could not honestly be referred to the dead; unfortunately it did not quicken our feeling for the living; but hideous as it was, obscured both living and dead; and for long did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom. ~ Virginia Woolf

To love those who despise us, and to give one's hand to the phantom who tries to frighten us? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

My mind has touched the farthest horizons of mortal imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand. And yet, like Faust, I look in vain, I learn in vain ... For as long as I live, no woman will ever look on me in love. ~ Susan Kay

My country is handed over from one tyrant to the next,
a worse tyrant; from one prison to another,
from one exile to another.
It is colonised by the observed
invader and the hidden one;
handed over by one beast to two
like an emaciated camel.
In the caverns of its death
my country neither dies
nor recovers. It digs
in the muted graves looking
for its pure origins
for its springtime promise
that slept behind its eyes
for the dream that will come
for the phantom that hid.
It moves from one overwhelming
night to a darker night.
My country grieves
in its own boundaries
and in other people's land
and even on its own soil
suffers the alienation
of exile. ~ Abdullah Al Baradouni

[Men] suffer, of course... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? ... But what about me [Satan]? I suffer, but still, I don't live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Phantom, as well as being backed up by that music, it just so was a role that I identified with so powerfully. From the first second that I walked on to perform. ~ Gerard Butler

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled. ~ Siegfried Sassoon

The phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon the southern horizon were flashes of the lightning that had so lately passed over our heads. My ~ H.P. Lovecraft

You've heard shards of our voice in the phantom-radio code of a numbers station in the roar of a crowd - in the screams of your clock - in the scrape of a chalkboard - in the snow static of a TV - in the chainsaw-decibel mating of cicadas - in the urban mythos that spreads amongst children like contagion - in the silence between lies.

White noise becomes a cadence. Words develop self-awareness. Viral. Evolving. Living poetry. Sentient language. ~ Joshua Alan Doetsch

Truth is a necessary phantom. ~ Mason Cooley

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen. ~ Iris Murdoch

I read the Phantom comics when I was in Australia shooting 'Dead Calm' and when one of the crew told me that there were plans for a movie, I went for it. That was in 1987 and I told (producer) Graham Burke I was going to be the Phantom. We had a laugh about that recently because you usually get what you deserve, not what you desire, and that is especially true in Hollywood! ~ Billy Zane

It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour. ~ Louis Sullivan

It so happens that this is particular love was precisely the sort best suited to the state of her soul. It was a sort of remote worship, a mute contemplation, a deification by an unknown votary. It was the apprehension of adolescence by adolescence, her dreams becoming romance ad remain in dream, the wished-for phantom realized at last and made flash, but still without name or wrong or fault, or need, or defect; in a word, a lover distant and ideal, a chimera having form. Any closer and more palpable encounter at this first stage would have terrified Cosette, still half buried in the magnifying mirage of the cloister. She had all the terrors of children and all the terrors of nuns mingled. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been steeped for five years, was still evaporating from her whole person, and made everything tremulous around her. In this condition, it was not a lover she needed, it was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to adore Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible. ~ Victor Hugo

Any one of my many shrinks could tell you that I was looking for my father. Wasn't everyone? The explanation didn't quite content me. Not that it seemed wrong: it just seemed too simple. Perhaps the search was really a kind of ritual in which the process was more important than the end. Perhaps it was a kind of quest. Perhaps there was no man at all, but just a mirage conjured by our longing and emptiness. When you go to sleep hungry you dream of eating. When you go to sleep with a full bladder you dream of getting up to pee. When you go to sleep horny you dream of getting laid. Maybe the impossible man was nothing more than a specter made of our own yearning. Maybe he was like the fearless intruder, the phantom rapist women expect to find under their bed or in their closets. Or maybe he was really death, the last lover. ~ Erica Jong

At last, I came to the Lost Dog's Home which my map told me marked teh turnoff to Shelly Beach.
You could hear some of the dogs barking, calling out for their owners to come and get them away from there ...
I hated going to those places because I always wanted to take all the dogs home or let them go free, even though I knew most of them would go straight out and be hit by a car or starve to death. I sometimes wished I could have a place where I could take those dogs and let them live. The Phantom had this sanctuary called Eden and all the animals there lived together, even tigers and baby deer, because they'd never learned it's kill or be killed. The maneaters ate fish out of the lagoon and the island was protected by the Bandar poison pygmies and by the piranha fish in the lagoon. I would have liked there to be such a place for pets who had been dumped of abandoned. They could feed the owners to the piranha. ~ Isobelle Carmody

The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone
Portent or promise
and gives way To pale, meek Dawn. ~ Herman Melville

My poor sister was forced to be in the plays that I would write. We would go to my grandma's retirement building and perform 'Phantom of the Opera.' ~ Lindy Booth

He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui. ~ Charles Baudelaire

How perverse! just when everything seems to be in order and as families gather round the table to have supper,the phantom of the superclass appears,selling impossible dreams:luxury,beauty,power.And the family falls apart ~ Paulo Coelho

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed. ~ Herman Melville

It's a thought," I said with a grin.
"That's exactly what it is, Dan - a thought - no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not In the body; the body is In Consciousness. And you Are that Consciousness - no the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your visions revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is Already yours, but not in the same way you imagined or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is in Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair.
"I'm not sure all of that sank in."
"Of course not." He laughed. "Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you'll be free at last. ~ Dan Millman

Ah, brothers, this God which I created was human work and human madness, like all gods!
He was human, and only a poor piece of man and Ego: this phantom came to me from my own fire and ashes, that is the truth! It did not come from the 'beyond'! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life. ~ Norton Juster

But Amarantha rolled her eyes and slouched in her throne. "Shatter him, Rhysand." She flicked a hand at the High Lord of the Summer Court. "You may do what you want with the body afterward."
The High Lord of the Summer Court bowed - as if he'd been given a gift - and looked to his subject, who had gone still and calm on the floor, hugging his knees. The male faerie was ready - relieved.
Rhys slipped a hand out of his pocket, and it dangled at his side. I could have sworn phantom talons flickered there as his fingers curled slightly.
"I'm growing bored, Rhysand," Amarantha said with a sigh, again fiddling with that bone. She hadn't looked at me once, too focused on her current prey.
Rhysand's fingers curled into a fist.
The faerie male's eyes went wide - then glazed as he slumped to the side in the puddle of his own waste. Blood leaked from his nose, from his ears, pooling on the floor.
That fast - that easily, that irrevocably … he was dead.
"I said shatter his mind, not his brain," Amarantha snapped.
The crowd murmured around me, stirring. I wanted nothing more than to fade back into it - to crawl back into my cell and burn this from my mind. Tamlin hadn't flinched - not a muscle. What horrors had he witnessed in his long life if this hadn't broken that distant expression, that control?
Rhysand shrugged, his hand sliding back into his pocket. "Apologies, my queen." He turned away without being dismissed, and didn't look at me as h ~ Sarah J. Maas

A phantom fish, half beaten to death, wriggled in my stomach. ~ Mike Mehalek

Never for one minute have I taken you for reality . . . You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Were I a man," she struck a fencing pose and swept her hand before her as if it held a razor-sharp rapier, "I'd fix him thus!" She stabbed once, twice, thrice, then whipped the imaginary tip across her victim's throat. Delicately she wiped the phantom blade and restored it to an equally airy scabbard. "Were I a man," she straightened to stare pensively through the window, "I'd assure myself that braggart knew the error of his ways and henceforth would bend to seek his fortune in some other corner of the world." She caught her reflection in the crystal panes and folding her hands, struck a demure pose. "Alas, a brawling lad I am not, but a mere woman." She turned her head from side to side to inspect the carefully arranged raven tresses, then smiled wisely at her image. "Thus my weapons must be my wit and tongue."
-Erienne ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

You dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom
hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air! ~ Thomas Hardy

Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? ~ Patrick Henry

I always found it weird when the Phantom would call Raoul insolent boy and the Raoul was obviously older than him. ~ Hugh Panaro

Many of the things which can never be, often are. ~ Norton Juster

When the nurse leaves, Doctor Rose mouths, "Act like you're in pain." Then she mimics a painful expression in case Summer doesn't understand. On the contrary, Summer's an expert at interpreting body language and reading lips. It's all thanks to her observant nature while enslaved on the Cosmos. Who else could tell that Peter's discomfort is due to him wearing the same pair of underwear for a week straight? Ah, yes, she always knew when day six and seven approached. She watched the crew member with much amusement as he waddled, pulled wedgies, and scratched his bum relentlessly. Not that anyone else cared to know that little nugget of information. ~ Laura Kreitzer

The space center's proximity to my backyard came to signify an intersection between heaven and hell. Florida was somewhere between the two; it was America's phantom limb, a place where spaceships were catapulted out into the cosmos. Alligators emerged from brackish water. Vultures and hawks circled above. Mosquitoes patrolled the atmosphere at eye level. We shared an ocean with sharks and dolphins. There were no seasons, only variations of humidity. Time slithered, festering in a damp wake of recollections.

I believed in the Bermuda Triangle. I thought it would move in over Florida one night. By dusk an unknown force would vaporize us through a tear in the atmosphere. We'd be stuck, wandering in a parallel version of the same place, unaware that we were dead but dreaming.

People came here to vanish. ~ Paul Kwiatkowski

Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias. ~ Adam Phillips

Millions of microscopic fragments of Julia now lay, invisibly, on the speckled beige linoleum tiles of the classroom floor. What was left in her chair was a phantom of Julia, which she learned to project at these moments, by sheer force of will, until she could resemble herself, a process that would take days, even weeks, and was never entirely successful. ~ Suzanne Berne

Sometimes I hear Mark laugh, and some days in the car the right song will come on the satellite radio and I'll feel him there tingling like a phantom limb. Like he's sitting there next to me in the dark. But I know that's not so. And I know that when you die there's not even darkness, and I know Mark and me won't meet on some cloud or in some pit of fire. And I guess that's a good thing. I couldn't take those eyes seeing what's become of me, those eyes looking down at my hands and my chewed-up ragged nails. ~ Jordan Harper

All our lives we are engaged in preserving our experiences and keeping them fresh by artificially sprinkling the water of memory over them. They have ceased to retain their original smell and fragrance. Do you call it life- this effort at the preservation of a phantom freshness in something that is withered and gone? ~ Vimala Thakar

So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible. ~ Norton Juster

There's a phantom feeling as if you're still inside me - pg. 90 Chapter 7

Jesse Alexander ~ S.J. Frost

I'm an obsessive musical theatre person, so some of the most formative albums for me were, you know, the 'Phantom Of The Opera' soundtrack or 'Into The Woods.' ~ Allison Williams