“A ghost can be a lot of things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Grief, anger, guilt. But, in my experience, most times they’re just what we want to see. Most times, a ghost is a wish.”
― The Haunting of Hill House (2018) dir. Mike Flanagan
“There are things that tie them to a place, very much like they do us. Some remain tethered to a patch of land. A time and date. The spilling of blood. A terrible crime. But there are others. Others that hold onto an emotion. A drive. Loss. Revenge. Or love. Those, they never go away.”
― Crimson Peak (2015) dir. Guillermo del Toro
“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
“What is a ghost, after all, but a repressed memory, the past demanding to be heard in the present?”
― Alfred Mac Adam, Introduction of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
“If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come to be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that house.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
“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 on 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, Wuthering Heights
“Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream”
“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
“In real life it’s the living who haunt you.”
— Franz Wright, from section 1 of “Observations,” Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
“Perhaps I haunted her as she haunted me”
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
“They were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. What can’t be.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
“And how odd it is to be haunted by someone who is still alive.”
― I Guess the Old You is a Ghost (#589: June 25, 2014)
“You’ll always be my favourite ghost”
― Big God, Florence + the Machine
“I’m begging you to keep on hunting me”
“I’ll come back to haunt you”
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