Haunting Quotes

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

~ Emily Brontë

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

~ Neil Gaiman

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living.

~ Alice Sebold

To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.

~ James Herbert

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed, you should try not to hear them.

~ Philip K. Dick

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

There is a child - a baby - who long since kicked off her blankets. Her skin is ashen and her mouth open in a perpetual yet silent scream. She isn't old enough to roll over, to sit up, to climb. So she lies there kicking her fat legs against the footboard of the crib, eternally calling for her mother. For food. For flesh.

~ Carrie Ryan

All in all, he thought it was a bad idea to get involved with the woman investigating his ex's possible suicide with intent to haunt.

~ Marybeth Niederkorn

There is nothing more agonising than the memory of good times when you are going through a difficult period in life. Life moves in only one direction - forward, but the memoirs of years gone by keep on haunting one’s soul till the time one is alive. Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon’s knife.

~ Anurag Shourie

You sit right next to me.Still you don't seem close to me.

~ Shillpi S Banerrji

Older, but no wiser. Alas, our dreams continue to haunt us.

~ Eliza Granville

The subject dropped, and we sat on in the dusk that was rapidly deepening into night. The door into the hall was open at our backs, and a panel of light from the lamps within was cast out to the terrace. Wandering moths, invisible in the darkness, suddenly became manifest as they fluttered into this illumination, and vanished again as they passed out of it. One moment they were there, living things with life and motion of their own, the next they quite disappeared. How inexplicable that would be, I thought, if one did not know from long familiarity, that light of the appropriate sort and strength is needed to make material objects visible.Philip must have been following precisely the same train of thought, for his voice broke in, carrying it a little further.'Look at that moth,' he said, 'and even while you look it has gone like a ghost, even as like a ghost it appeared. Light made it visible. And there are other sorts of light, interior psychical light which similarly makes visible the beings which people the darkness of our blindness.' (Expiation)

~ E.f. Benson

Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

~ John Milton

The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?

~ David Mitchell

In the end, you will not see the physical beauty in others that caught your eye, but the fire that burned within them. This kind of beauty is the bonfire you had to attend.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I wish we would all just fall apart so I wouldn't have to listen to the downfall happen, so slowly, so painfully.

~ Hannah Moskowitz

So much time spent believingwe had ghosts in our machines has accustomed us to hauntingourselves.

~ D.j. Maclennan

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?Two things result from this fact.I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

~ Karl Marx

Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn't say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognized Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.

~ Anthony Horowitz

The one plus side to demonic infestation is that children cannot be harmed by a demon. The sanctified aura of a child somehow repels the demon and they can only oppress them if the parent makes a contract allowing them to do so. Because they can be very clever in tricking people into agreeing to additional contracts, it is important to never converse with a demon. Either call in a priest or move out as soon as possible.

~ Alexei Maxim Russell

It is not in my nature to be interested in the living.But there are many things, I have found, that defy nature.

~ Rin Chupeco

During those times, only under piles of blankets did she feel substantial enough not to drift away; they kept her weighted down and a part of the world. But eventually her dog's persistence and her own strong will would win over, and she'd drag herself up from the thick bog and go back to her chores and her books, carving the missing days into the wall so they did not escape entirely.

~ Seré Prince Halverson

I’ve seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly… they can’t kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I’ve seen humans die from smoking them… if I were you I would stop smoking them.”“Why should I? You smoke ‘em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes,” Mandy pointed out.“Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties… for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes… but I’m not a person, I’m Pollution, things like that aren’t dangerous to me but they are to you,” Alecto told her. “It’s not a good idea.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

You haunt my days and dreams.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

It was all real and blazing with detail. But I was shadow, light as mist, mute as the wallpaper.

~ Laura Whitcomb

Come in! come in !’ he sobbed.‘Cathy, do come. Oh do -once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! hear me this time - Catherine, at last!

~ Emily Brontë

There was this constant urge in me to tear my insides apart,I didn't know why. By the time I made my mind that it was impossible for meto do, there alighted the fear, haunting me with the words that rangconstantly in my head, You're not brave enough.I didn't feel devastated, I felt the urge to be devastated.

~ Sanhita Baruah

                And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleepWe'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been                    Had we not taken his place.

~ Mark Strand

Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do. ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed...

~ Frederick Buechner

He wasn’t gullible enough to be bullied by the ghost’s accusation – for Andrew Fletcher had his share of guilt, but he’d never thrown anyone down a well, either.

~ Christina Harlin

If you mean to scare women away from you, that speech can’t possibly work. Those threats? If I weren’t trying to hire you I’d be taking my clothes off right now.

~ Christina Harlin

In my experience, people who want to keep their painful injuries are using them as a crutch. They’re hiding from something.

~ Christina Harlin

There’s a little angel on one of my shoulders saying that this is a wicked thing to do. Then there’s a little devil on my other shoulder, and she looks a lot like you.

~ Christina Harlin

Something was bleeding… and something was broken. It was my heart… because I had to leave you. (Chase to Rayne)

~ Kimberly Brockman

The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.

~ Andrea Camilleri

It was haunted, but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally, they have to do with the menace of memory.

~ Anne Rice

I didn't sleep well last night because one of my ghosts came back, haunting with his presence, and when I woke up, the others weren't here, haunting with their memory.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lostmemories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreamsplay when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

~ Nathan Reese Maher