The Ghost Quotes

Only the broken heart has the ghost of a chance to grieve, to forgive, to long, to transform.
Christina Baldwin, author of Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, 1990. Used with author's permission ~ Judith-Victoria Douglas

T hey were both restless in the night. In a day or two Dick would try to banish the ghost of Rosemary before it became walled up with them, but for the moment he had no force to do it. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. ~ Thomas Hobbes

There is a ghost here. A lonely, heartbroken spirit. The ghost of everything that could've been and never was. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

This time, there was the ghost of a reptile in Szatson's smile. 'I don't handle little problems. ~ Whitley Strieber

Her voice is thin and her moan is high,
And her cackling laugh or her barking cold
Bring terror to the young and old.
O Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Lean is the ghost of Molly Means. ~ Margaret Walker

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making. ~ Walter De La Mare

When a relationship dies do we ever really give up the ghost or are we forever haunted by the spirits of relationships past? ~ Sarah Jessica Parker

Love can be so hauntingly beautiful, waking up past selves that have been wandering aimlessly through the corridors of our soul, for far too long. When someone else can take us from the ghost-town of our inner-selves, to exciting new landscapes, it's worth the risk, just to feel reborn. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter, and it was a happier house for this man's death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure. ~ Charles Dickens

Atticus, I think we're being stalked by the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. First it was a Vulture adn now two giant ravens are coming our way. Oberon ~ Kevin Hearne

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluste ~ Donna Tartt

I've always felt that if you back down from a fear, the ghost of that fear never goes away. It diminishes people. ~ Hugh Jackman

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. ~ David Foster Wallace

If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?
~ William H Gass

When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds. ~ Gilbert Ryle

Walt also had a humorous sign posted outside the mansion, recruiting ghosts who wanted to enjoy 'active retirement' in the "country club atmosphere' of this 'fashionable address'. Interested ghosts were to write to the 'Ghost Relations Dept. Disneyland,' and were told,'Do not apply in person. ~ Leslie Le Mon

The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past its walls, and thought that, if I reached down, I could feel Adso's soft gray fur under my fingers. I swallowed, hard. ~ Diana Gabaldon

On the very tip of his tongue is his Firerancher. Thin as tissue paper, it looks like the moon in the daytime sky. Suddenly love is looming over the car, as big and invisible as the ghost mountains of the Comobabi range. I smile at him and turn up the radio with my toes. ~ Jo Ann Beard

I tried to call out to them, but instead heard myself saying, "Thank you, I'd love a ride," loud enough for all the ghost hunters to hear. ~ J.D. Horn

I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D. December, 1843. ~ Charles Dickens

As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness. ~ Michael Chabon

I am the ghost in Harrenhal. ~ George R R Martin

A revenant is also a deceased person returning from the dead to haunt the living, either as a disembodied ghost or alternatively as a corpse. Some people believe the ghost or spirit never leaves Earth until there is no-one left to remember the ~ Charmaine Weems

Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.
"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster? ~ Charles Stross

I read a lot of bad books- books so bad that they aren't even published,which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
- The Ghost, Robert Harris. ~ Robert Harris

Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice's mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes. ~ Simon Avery

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. ~ Terence McKenna

I'm not a strong virgin any more, I'm a mighty woman. I'm no longer just the ghost of a human being, I'm solid. But how could I be real if I never cast a shadow? I need my darker side in order to be whole. ~ Cathy Dobson

You can find something funny in anything! I'm sick as a dog and falling to bits, but I'll give up joking only after I give up the ghost! my last gasp! The proof, here, with only an eighth of a glimmer of light, things oozing out of my asshole, my armpits, and the elbows, too, blood coming out of the eyes, from the soupy mess of my grave, me whistling a tune, that's what you'll hear! A regular blackbird! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

What is a look of absolute fear? Popescu asked. The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles untile he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute fear. ~ Roberto Bolano

He was dead; I needed to let his memory go, too. That was the first step for me, before discrimination.
Yet my love was the ghost of a young girl's dream. It walked alone in the abyss, stubbornly, where only illusions prospered on tears and regrets. My love had a life of its own; it was perverted but nevertheless still vital. For that reason, I wanted to return to deep space. Honestly, I would have preferred it if we had traveled forever and never stopped at another star system. To fall into endless blackness, that was my new fantasy.
The young girl with the ancient dream wept. I could hear her; I even saw her tears on the glass of the observation deck. It made me feel old. I didn't want to know her name. I couldn't forget Tem but I needed to forget her. ~ Christopher Pike

You weren't alone," he says, making sure I hear every word. "And you weren't floating."
"How do you know?" I ask.
"Because I was carrying you. ~ Rebecca Harris

What if you could meet your soul mate?" the ghost asked. "You 'd want to avoid that?"
"Hell, yes. The idea that there's one soul out there, waiting to merge with mine like some data-sharing program, depresses the hell out of me."
"It's not like that. It's not about losing yourself."
"Then what is it?" Alex was only half listening, still occupied with the viselike tightness of his chest.
"It's like your whole life you 've been falling toward the earth, until the moment someone catches you. And you realise that somehow you 've caught her at the same time. And together, instead of falling, you might be able to fly. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face ~ Bob Dylan

Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns. ~ Hilary Mantel

I feel the ghost of his fingers inside me. ~ Amy Reed

I've never liked urban myths. I've never liked pretending to believe in them; never understood why everyone else doesn't see straight through them. Why is it they've always happened to a friend of a friend - someone you've never met? Why does everyone smile and nod and pull the right faces, when they must know they're not true? Pointless. A waste of breath.
So I sneered at the myths about Scaderstone Pit. It was just an old quarry – nothing more. I never believed in the rumours of discarded dynamite. It had decayed, they said. It exploded at the slightest touch, had even blown someone's hand off. I shrugged off the talk of the toxic waste. It was dumped in the dead of night, they said. The canisters rusting away, leaking deadly poisons that could blind you, burn your lungs. I laughed at the ghost stories. You could hear the moans, they said, of quarrymen buried alive and never found. You could see their nightwalking souls, searching for their poor crushed bodies.
I didn't believe any of it – not one word. Now, after everything that's happened, I wonder whether I should've listened to those stories. Maybe then, these things would've happened to someone else, and I could've smiled and said they were impossible.
But this is not an urban myth. And it did not happen to someone else, but to me. I've set it down as best I can remember. Whether you believe it or not, is up to you. ~ Mikey Campling

You listen to me this one time, Dahlia. If something goes wrong, anything at all, you haul butt out of here fast. You have the cell phone and the number. Call Lily. The Ghost Walkers will be here as soon as possible."
She caught him before he could turn away. "You listen to me this one time, Nicholas. If anything goes wrong, don't be a hero. Haul your butt out of there and in one piece. We'll call Lily, and she can send the others. ~ Christine Feehan

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in such a world" as ours....' 'The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. ~ John R.W. Stott

Betrayal felt bitter and acrid in my throat, and the ghost of it was everywhere, taunting my reflection. How could he do this to me? How could he doubt me so much to expose me to the ridicule and glances of the celestial world? All this time, Amar said nothing. Our bed became a cold thing and my heart froze with it. ~ Roshani Chokshi

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

He turned it upside down and shook the fries and hamburger into the grave. "In my day, we used animal blood," the ghost mumbled. "It's perfectly good enough. They can't taste the difference." "I will treat them with respect," Nico said. "At least let me keep the toy," the ghost said. ~ Rick Riordan

I glanced in the first open door and stopped short. Desks. Four tiny desks. A wall of faded posters of alphabet animals. A blackboard, still showing the ghost of numbers. I blinked, certain I was seeing wrong.
Derek nudged my legs, telling me to get moving. I looked at him, and I looked at the classroom.
This was where Derek had grown up. Four tiny desks. Four little boys. Four young werewolves.
For a second, I could see them - three boys working at the three clustered desks, Derek alone at the fourth, pushed slightly away, hunched over his work, trying to ignore the others.
Derek nudged me again, whining softly, and I looked down to see him eyeing the room, every hair on his neck on end, anxious to get away from this place. ~ Kelley Armstrong

At school, Max searched the archives alone-Edmund had stopped appearing, and I didn't have the heart to summon him. Kylee was still acting timid and injured, and the ghost jocks were even more outrageously annoying-trying to cover their underlying nervousness, I thought.

Harry and Sara couldn't feel anything wrong, but they took their cues from us, and searched the student lounges with a wariness that I'd never seen from either of them. Britta was as sneering and mean as ever, completely unchanged, and I wanted to kiss her.

I managed to restrain myself. ~ Lee Nichols

Of the Scream: "Sing for me"
... Christine, asked him: "Why are you so good, with me?, and the ghost, said:
-Because, for a lot of time, I wasn't with any. ~ Eva Castillo Carón

No wonder that the ghost and goblin stories had a new zest. No wonder that the blood of the more timid grew chill and curdled, that their flesh crept, and their hearts beat irregularly, and the girls peeped fearfully over their shoulders, and huddled close together like frightened sheep, and half-fancied they beheld some impish and malignant face gibbering at them from the darkling corners of the old room. By degrees my high spirits died out, and I felt the childish tremors, long latent, long forgotten, coming over me. I followed each story with painful interest; I did not ask myself if I believed the dismal tales. I listened and fear grew upon me - the blind, irrational fear of our nursery days. ("Horror: A True Tale") ~ John Berwick Harwood

Suddenly the dressing-room of La Sorelli, one of the principal dancers, was invaded by half-a-dozen young ladies of the ballet, who had come up from the stage after "dancing" Polyeucte. They rushed in amid great confusion, some giving vent to forced and unnatural laughter, others to cries of terror. Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment to "run through" the speech which she was to make to the resigning managers, looked around angrily at the mad and tumultuous crowd. It was little Jammes - the girl with the tip-tilted nose, the forget-me-not eyes, the rose-red cheeks and the lily-white neck and shoulders - who gave the explanation in a trembling voice:

"It's the ghost!" And she locked the door.

- Chapter 1: Is it the Ghost? ~ Gaston Leroux

The dead don't die. Death is something a living person suffers through, once the dead are gone from here. The departed don't know anything about dread, or longing, or the inevitable. They leave that to the survivors. ~ Scott Kelly

They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn't appear before them again like the ghost of Hamlet's father or Jacob Marley or some other ... ~ Stephen King

She knows not loves that kissed her She knows not where. Art thou the ghost, my sister, White sister there, Am I the ghost, who knows? My hand, a fallen rose, Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

I woke up to an ache in my chest, the smell of chocolate, and the sound of the ghost making a racket in the kitchen. Now, I'm not the sort to dwell on doom and sorrow. Life is too short for that. But I should at least try to describe the ache briefly: It is not the kind that comes from eating tacos too late at night. It's the kind that comes from being left behind. I think my heart is smart enough to know there's a place I should be filling with new memories, new jokes, and wondrous adventures with the one person I loved most of all. But that person is gone now. And so, my heart has a giant hole. I call it The Big Empty. ~ Natalie Lloyd

Do we dust for fingerprints now?" I asked.
He swiveled his head back around until he was gazing at me. "Who do we look like? The Hardy Boys?"
Silas chuckled at us without looking up from the laptop screen.
Stone, C. L. (2014-01-19). Drop of Doubt: The Ghost Bird Series: #5 (Kindle Locations 945-947). Arcato Publishing. Kindle Edition. ~ C.L.Stone

It's funny, really: the older you get, the more you know about the world. The synapses in your brain fire at a higher level and quicker function, your knowledge expands. But you lose part of yourself, that part able to imagine great armies that wait for nothing more than your command; the dragon that hides under your bed that only you can see, its long emerald tail flashing in the darkness; the ghost that lives in your attic that only moans at 3:23 in the morning. When you lose that innocence, the world's hues become dark and muted, and you know that dragons aren't real. There is no army. There is no ghost in the attic. But when you're nine? When you're nine, it's all probable, it's all realistic, and even more so, it's all true. ~ T.J. Klune

He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, PEDE CLAUDO, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

When I opened my eyes, we were still surrounded by darkness. A lantern, standing on the ground, showed a bubbling well. The water splashing from the well disappeared, almost at once, under the floor on which I was lying, with my head on the knee of the man in the black cloak and the black mask. He was bathing my temples and his hands smelt of death. I tried to push them away and asked, 'Who are you? Where is the voice?' His only answer was a sigh. Suddenly, a hot breath passed over my face and I perceived a white shape, beside the man's black shape, in the darkness. The black shape lifted me on to the white shape, a glad neighing greeted my astounded ears and I murmured, 'Cesar!' The animal quivered. Raoul, I was lying half back on a saddle and I had recognized the white horse out of the PROFETA, which I had so often fed with sugar and sweets. I remembered that, one evening, there was a rumor in the theater that the horse had disappeared and that it had been stolen by the Opera ghost. I believed in the voice, but had never believed in the ghost. Now, however, I began to wonder, with a shiver, whether I was the ghost's prisoner. I called upon the voice to help me, for I should never have imagined that the voice and the ghost were one. You have heard about the Opera ghost, have you not, Raoul?"

"Yes, but tell me what happened when you were on the white horse of the Profeta?"

"I made no movement and let myself go. The black shape held me up, and I made no e ~ Gaston Leroux

The next morning, when the Otis family met at breakfast, they discussed the ghost at some length. The United States Minister was naturally a little annoyed to find that his present had not been accepted. "I have no wish," he said, "to do the ghost any personal injury, and I must say that, considering the length of time he has been in the house, I don't think it is at all polite to throw pillows at him" - a very just remark, at which, I am sorry to say, the twins burst into shouts of laughter. "Upon the other hand," he continued, "if he really declines to use the Rising Sun Lubricator, we shall have to take his chains from him. It would be quite impossible to sleep, with such a noise going on outside the bedrooms. ~ Oscar Wilde

I could think of a hundred things I'd rather do than follow a possible murderess and the ghost of her victim. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

Not that Beulah didn't present her own set of problems. She did. Not least of which was fighting the temptation to fake some scribbles on her and let the ghost have fun. ~ Stacia Kane

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me
a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for. ~ Andre Aciman

If there's a feeling to home, it's this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried; not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back at you as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms. Feel the ghost of your mother as you sit at the kitchen table, hear the words of your father circling round and round after dinner, and your brother stopping by, wishing you'd be a little better, a little stronger ... It's four walls echoing back everything you've ever been and everything you've ever done, and it's the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all. ~ Megan Miranda

The light of a new day always chases the shadows of the night away, and shows us that the shape of our fears is only the ghost of our own minds. ~ Terry Goodkind

I don't believe in ghosts - not the scary white sheet, boogie-woogie type of ghost anyway. And yet ... I don't disbelieve either. I'm kind of sitting on the ghost fence, dangling my legs on both sides, not sure which way to jump. I think I might be here for a while. ~ Karen Tayleur

From The Ghost Wars- on the concept of the Torah as ancient science fiction. "Take the story of the fall of the tower of Babel. Let's say this represents not an act of God, nor a metaphor for this planet's diverse linguistic heritage; but a catastrophic act of terrorism by the Divisionists to sever mankind from the neural net. The internet in this situation becomes mankind's attempt to build a physical replacement for a natural ability long lost. Think of it as a wooden leg or a pacemaker. ~ Cole J. Davis

Hey, Peanut," Nathan said with a smirk.
"Where've you been?" "Well we were going to Europe, but there was this big ocean in the way and North didn't want to get the bike wet, so we had to come back."
Stone, C. L. (2014-05-31). Push and Shove: The Ghost Bird Series: #6 (p. 249). Arcato Publishing. Kindle Edition. ~ C.L.Stone

I never existed at all. Heavenly fire burns away that which is evil. Jace survived Glorious because he is good. There was enough of him left to lie. But I was born to be all corruption. There is not enough left of me to survive. You see the ghost of someone who could have been, that is all. ~ Cassandra Clare

All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghost of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there's no competition. I've stopped fighting them. They're crashing and banging around in there now. Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry- I see you already have. Damn ghost. ~ Sara Gruen

If you destroy your identity, if you cut all ties and fake your death, then what's left? Something without labels, something with money
and freedom. ~ Scott Kelly

Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret. I shan't give you another chance. ~ David Mitchell

I must have come back to her," the ghost said distractedly. "I must have married her. But that
would mean - " He gave Alex a sharp glance. "Zoë could be my granddaughter."
Alex rubbed his forehead and pinched the corners of his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "Oh,
great."
"That means hands off from now on."
"You were pushing me to go after her," Alex said in outrage.
"That was before I knew about this. I don't want you becoming part of my family tree."
"Back off, pal. I'm not going near anyone's family tree. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The ghost of the heart of manred Cain
And the more murderous brain
Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death
Of his mother Earth, and tore
Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived. ~ Edith Sitwell

The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind. ~ Virginia Woolf

Hapi?" I asked.
"Why, yes, I am happy!" Hapi beamed. "I'm always happy because I'm Hapi! Are you happy?"
Zia frowned up at the giant. "Does he have to be so big?"
The god laughed. Immediately he shrank down to human size, though the crazy cheerful look on his face was still pretty unnerving.
"Oh, Setne!" Hapi chuckled and pushed the ghost playfully. "I hate this guy. Absolutely despise him!"
Hapi's smile became painfully wide. "I'd love to rip off your arms and legs, Setne. That would be amazing!"
Setne ... drifted a little farther away from the smiling god.
"Oh!" Hapi clapped excitedly. "The world is going to end tomorrow. I forgot!"
"You'd never get to Memphis without my help. You'd get torn into a million pieces!"
He seemed genuinely pleased to share that news. ~ Rick Riordan

The fact that she was still alive felt wrong, out of balance. She didn't feel special, or protected, or gods-bound. She thought the gods had acted to protect the roan, and she had just been along for the ride. It was the roan who was special, not she.
I should be dead, she thought. If she was dead, then all would have been settled. The warlord's men would have been satisfied to see her body swept away, the roan would have been safe from Beck's whip, the ghost of tyhe man she had killed could have gone to his rest. There was a rounding off - a justice - in her death. But alive, no one was satisfied and no one was safe. ~ Pamela Freeman

This is incredible. This is quite amazing because who you're honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers. And I wouldn't be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library's been the center of my life. I never made it to college. I started going to the library when I graduated from high school. I went to the library every day for three or four days a week for 10 years and I graduated from the library when I was 28. ~ Ray Bradbury

...we are haunting ourselves in the present from the past and the future via the ghost and the alien. ~ Jeffrey J. Kripal

I'm find," her voice squeaked out. Remembering the maggots-and not one hundred percent sure the ghost had taken them with her-Kylie leapt up, yanked the covers off the bed, and tossed them on the floor, she backed away from the pile of bedding.
"Yeah. You look just fine," Della said sarcastically.
Kylie jumped from foot to foot and brushed off imaginary maggots that she felt crawling on her skin.
Della stood there in Mickey Mouse pajamas, staring at her as if she didn't' know whether to laugh or run.
Kylie stopped dancing and tried to breathe normally. "If I die, promise me I'll be cremated."
Della frowned. "Die?"
"Not that I'm planning to die anytime soon." She gave her arm one more swipe. "But still."
Della shook her head. "I don't know why you pretend you're okay. ~ C.C. Hunter

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

the "The Ghost in your Genes" video. ~ Anna B. Baranowsky

Stop being the ghost of your past. You're burying yourself in agony instead of living the joy the present is freely giving you. ~ Joena San Diego

The ghost-walking, the short-tempered distraction, the hurried fog. (All of this I'm just assuming, because I have no idea how I come across, my consciousness is that underground, like a toad in winter.) ~ Maria Semple

There is a sweet anguish springing up in our bosoms when a child's face brightens under the shadow of the waiting angel. There is an autumnal fitness when age gives up the ghost; and when the saint dies there is a tearful victory. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

I'm alone with the ghost of the swamp, somewhere near the weeping willows. ~ Steven Herrick

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

Thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy. ~ Jack Kerouac

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

Mystery the moon
A hole in the sky
A supernatural nightlight
So full but often right
A pair of eyes, a closin' one,
A chosen child of golden sun
A marble dog that chases cars
To farthest reaches of the beach and far beyond into the swimming sea of stars

A cosmic fish they love to kiss
They're giving birth to constellation
No riffs and oh, no reservation.
If they should fall you get a wish or dedication
May I suggest you get the best
For nothing less than you and I
Let's take a chance as this romance is rising over before we lose the lighting
Oh bella bella please
Bella you beautiful luna
Oh bella do what you do
Do do do do do

You are an illuminating anchor
Of leagues to infinite number
Crashing waves and breaking thunder
Tiding the ebb and flows of hunger
You're dancing naked there for me
You expose all memory
You make the most of boundary
You're the ghost of royalty imposing love
You are the queen and king combining everything
Intertwining like a ring around the finger of a girl
I'm just a singer, you're the world
All I can bring ya
Is the language of a lover
Bella luna, my beautiful, beautiful moon
How you swoon me like no other

May I suggest you get the best
Of your wish may I insist
That no contest for little you or smaller I
A larger c ~ Jason Mraz

He was the ghost you never saw coming, death breathing down your neck before you even realized you were in the crosshairs. ~ Lara Adrian

I hope I'm the ghost that belongs to her. ~ Courtney Summers

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye. ~ W. H. Auden

If I have learned one thing in the years of my existence, one nugget of wisdom from having lived in the midst of disputations over faith and the nature of the world, it is that everything ends. This is both the blessing and the punishment of God upon the foolish tribe that calls itself man. We can embrace the end or we can weep, but the ghost of time closes all doors with a finality that can never be gainsaid. ~ Kamran Pasha

I'm convinced that people see the ghosts of themselves all the time, but most just chose to block them out. The words don't even make sense to me, and I know it's true. When I was seven years old I saw the ghost of myself at the age of eighteen. Ever since that day I've kicked myself for not asking questions. I've no idea what my eighteen-year-old self could have told me at that point - perhaps nothing at all. Still, I can't help but think of it as a lost opportunity. Somehow there was a slight fluctuation in the current, and two of me bled through the fabric at once.
Trying to figure out the meaning behind such events can drive you mad, because there is no answer. Perhaps it was some sort of hiccup. Then again, perhaps I was making some Herculean efforts to reach out to myself, and that was all I could manage. ~ Damien Echols

I will tell him that I've always thought he was a monster. And that I want to be his bride ~ Yangzee Choo

The use of ghosts as a means of social control predated the Klan. Slave owners employed so-called patterollers, usually poor whites, who would patrol the countryside at night; such patrols would regularlyuse spook stories, among other tactics, to help keep enslaved people from escaping. "The fraudulent ghost," [Gladys-Marie] Fry writes, "was the first in a gradually developed system of night-riding creatures, the fear of which was fostered by white for the purpose of slave control." A man in a white sheet on horseback riding ominously through a forest could help substantiate rumers that the forest was haunted and that those who valued their lives best avoid it. By spreading ghost stories, Southern whites hoped to limit the unauthorized movement of black people. If cemeteries, crossroads, and forests came to be known particularly as haunted, it's because they presented the easiest means of escape and had to be patrolled.

Now it's common to think of such places as the provenance of spirits. We have stories for such places: a tragic death, forlorn lovers, a devil waiting to make a deal -- stories that reflect a rich tradition of American folklore. But all this might have come much later, and these places might have first earned their haunted reputation through much more deviant methods. In the ghost-haunting legacies of many of these public spaces lies a hidden history of patrolling and limiting access. ~ Colin Dickey

Paper is poverty, it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Red cross donation, baby! the ghost yelled. ~ Serpent's Shadow Rick Riordan

No, she'd simply had no energy to clean the place out after Robbie left. Interesting, though, how seeing the ease of familiarity with which Matthew moved around the cabin blurred the ghost of Robbie. ~ Melissa Tagg

Come in,
come in! and know me better, man! I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! You have never seen the like of me before! ~ Charles Dickens

wasn't so sure. After all, the ghost seemed quite confident in addressing him and Tyler as Billy Ray and Zachariah. Hoping to learn more, he read through the rest of the 1916 ledger, disappointed to find no other mention of either Allie McCormick's disappearance or the Hobson brothers' fate. "Well, I believe we now have enough information to work with," said John, ~ Aiden James

A ghost is something that fills a hole inside you, where you lost something. It's a memory. Sometimes it can be painful, and sometimes it can be scary. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the ghost ends and real life begins. ~ Nathan Ballingrud