Best 42 quotes in «ghost story quotes» category

No woman will ever take care of my children but me, she said. I will not allow it, do you understand? And after I am gone Madge Toxley, if you try to make them yours, then you will live to regret it.

Neither of us had lived in a house since we were kids; apartments, it turns out, are very different things, psychologically. Houses—especially old and creaky houses—are individuals, somehow; their fronts are faces, their closets are pants pockets.

Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.

the door to his room is open.his face amooth in sleep.Lips relaxed,boys lips, i remember can be so rough, so tender, so sweet.So full of lies.

She sensed her own power to enslave him. He would come willingly enough. No filthy atheistic beliefs she held were strong enough to douse what was crackling in the brief space between them. It would satisfy her on a hundred levels, to bring him to his knees.

Strange though it may seem, people rarely show such enthusiasm as when they are seeking the proof of a ghost story—the soul gathers all this sort of thing to its hungry bosom.

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over. For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment. Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.

The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco.

The lake's deep...and dark...and dangerous.

The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.

The reader must judge for himself.

This is a work of fiction, and the people in it are fictitious. The ghosts are real.

Very soon you will find yourself at the end of a dirt road, only inches from a threshold . . . a threshold into another world—a glorious world, one of infinite possibility. You’ll be standing there contemplating your next move when a gust of wind whispers, “Have faith.” When you hear those magic words, it’ll be time for you to cross the threshold and begin your journey . . .

(Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

You are not there, Father,” I cried. “I wake up at Gaudlin Hall, I spend most of my day there, I sleep there at night. And throughout it all there is but one thought running through my mind.” “And that is?” “This house is haunted.

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

Tugging her purse strap up on her arm, she headed for the door. “You have my cell number. I’ll text you. If something goes wrong and he pulls an axe, you’ll be the first person I call.” Michelle groaned. “See, this is why I worry. The first person you call is the police. Then you call me and tell me the authorities are on their way and you’re hiding in a closet.” “Yeah, ancient wooden closet door versus axe? And you call me the illogical one?

We ask our brain to stop worrying, stop obsessing, stop dreaming the same scary dreams again and again. But our brain rarely takes requests.

Don't starve an instinct with a lie on, Never hit or deceive a wounded lion. He heals faster than you can imagine And hurts even more when in famine.

After breakfast the host takes the young man into a corner, and explains to him that what he saw was the ghost of a lady who had been murdered in that very bed, or who had murdered somebody else there - it does not really matter which: you can be a ghost by murdering somebody else or by being murdered yourself, whichever you prefer. The murdered ghost is, perhaps, the more popular; but, on the other hand, you can frighten people better if you are the murdered one, because then you can show your wounds and do groans. ("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)

As the years passed, it became clear that Alio was a ghost, not an imaginary friend. Imaginary friends have no borders, but ghosts often do.

Been practicing ever since I managed to tackle you. I figured there must be something to your idea about strong feelings." "Yeah. They can be hard to manufacture on demand, though." "So far I've managed okay." "Thinking about my dad usually gets it done for me. What about you? What do you think about?" He looked at me for a long moment before he said, "You." I didn't expect that answer. "Me? Really? Do I frustrate you that much?" "Kissing you," he clarified. "I think about kissing you." Oh. "Oh. Really?" I stood up and bumped into the table. It moved. Joe looked at it and smiled. "You thinking about kissing me?" "Well I am now." He got up and came toward me. "Good.

beneath the stars that drift; she sighed and said "Every tale of a love can only be a tale of ghosts that linger in these spaces we can never hold,"—as the wind gave echo

Don’t forget young Chester, ‘The past is a foreign country’, but boarding school will be another world, my boy!

Do you like a good ghost story?”-Jonah

After her declaration to become a ghost, her sister had given a nervous half-laugh and said that she didn't want Adelaide to do anything to scare her. Adelaide had agreed, but said she'd move things around her home just to confuse her. And laughed too. Her husband, Simon, had told her not to be morbid and reminded her that the consultant wasn't sure. It was possible she might live.

A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.

As she appears in the room, her face is still covered by the hood of her coat, but I can see the outline of her chin, and a faint glow that frightens me. She slowly pulls back the hood and her eyes bore into me. Eyes red with flame, it is though they are scanning my soul, deep within me." From 'She Blames Me' (Banfield Tales)

His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story. (introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)

Even if I had convict ancestry, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. As far as I’m concerned, the real criminals back in those days weren’t twelve-year-old boys nicking a loaf of bread or a pair of socks to ward off hunger and blisters. No, it was those who exploited them; keeping the battler in the gutter while they sat around in their manors, sipping tea and admiring portraits of their toffee-nosed great grandfathers.

He is a ghost he shouldn't be watching soapies!

History is a ghost story.

He knew lounging was dangerous because he could already sense depression creeping over him like a vampire’s shadow. In the past, he’d found that the best way to combat this feeling was to keep moving, as if misery were a barnacle that couldn’t latch on to him if he didn’t sit still for too long.

It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature’s tough bracken, all picture-postcard like.

I already told you a ghost story," she said at last. "The one where the wife was invisible to the husband and the truth of the marriage was invisible to her.

It always is Christmas Eve, in a ghost story. ("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)

I am who I am and always shall be.

I often stood and stared into those tunnels and thought about what happened there; how I was separated from it only by time." - The Procession

I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.

Mackenzie, our profession courts death, madness is always just over the next rise, the next hillock…” Sherman’s voice dropped off, “I’m out in that landscape wavering between madness and sanity. Be careful Mackenzie you don’t cross over that rise and find yourself in the arid desert of madness … I fear it is this desert for me.

It looks like a funeral parlour in here. Am I dead?

It seemed for a moment as if something was there, loitering between the knurled and towering cherry trees, a flash of a presence as stark as the sight of the snow against their bare branches and cracked, piceous bark. Unblinking, I watched the edge of the lake, waiting for it to reappear, but whatever it had been was gone, vanished under cover of a willow tree, lofty and dense, rearing over the lake, its branches dripping all the way to the ground. The tree’s lament had been transformed into a thing of such beauty I was tempted to go and hide within it.