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Ghosts Quotes

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Ghosts Quotes

“That, my dear detective, was the other San Francisco. You've probably seen it before, just out of the corner of your eye. You've probably dismissed it all your life. Maybe you always told yourself you'd just had too much to drink." She paused, her gaze heavy on his face. MacMillian squirmed. "But I'm guessing you always knew better." His head was throbbing. He shook it once, twice, but it didn't clear. "I don't get it, Miss..." "Alan," she supplied. He nodded. "Ms. Alan. Why are you here?" Her eyes darkened. "Because there are things that go bump in the night, Mr. MacMillian. It's my job to bump back.”

“As we strolled into the hospital, I couldn’t help thinking about Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe” because I was having a difficult time staying calm. I had been kidnapped and beaten senseless by an agent of Lucifer, and yet the white coats the doctors wore scared me just as badly. The men who had taken me from my mother wore those same damned lab coats. Every time I saw one, it awakened a dormant fear inside me—fear that I’d be dragged away from someone I loved again, fear that I’d be placed into the waiting hands of another horrible person. It would never truly go away. Michael’s shoulder bumped mine, which shook me out of my thoughts. I glanced at him. “What?” “You’re frowning.” “Am I supposed to be smiling right now?” He faced forward, looking at our reflection in the elevator doors. “No, but you look like you’re about to bolt at any second.” I watched the digital numbers change one by one as we rose up to the right floor, fiddling with the rosary in the pocket of my leather jacket. Somehow, the beads had a calming effect on me. “I’m fine.” “Hard ass.” A tiny smirk touched my lips. “Stop thinking about my butt. You’re an archangel.” He grinned, but didn’t reply.”

“It’s possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structure they were born with. But the question still remains: Are these people whose EMF-influenced brains alert them to “presences” picking up something real that the rest of us can’t pick up, or are they hallucinating? Here again, we must end with the Big Shrug, a statue of which is being erected on the lawn outside my office.”

“Nothing's worth any effort in the end," he said to Laura, "because everyone is going to die and there is nothing in the world that will stop them from dying. Nothing lasts. A few things last longer than most people live, but they go too. Hope goes, and desire and wonder and fear and eagerness. Love lasts a few minutes longer, that's all. A minute or a month or an hour. The paper match burns down until it singes your fingers and goes out, and there you are in the dark again, rubbing your two little sticks together. But this is the last time, the last match. There won't be any more light. No more. And no more noise of things moving or of animals lying down. Only our separate, untouching selves, and soon not even that.”

“While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.”

“But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12). I imagine, that during the period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off.”

“The misty sun came through the window and cast a yellow halo around her, making her eyes glow like clover. Lorenzo yearned to comfort her, but he felt lately that it was his presence over the years that helped put her in her state. She was an attractive, bright, and funny girl who should have been living a bold teenage life, but she existed with one foot in the living world and one in the grave. What he hadn’t known when he fell in love with her as a stepbrother would adopt a new, much younger sister, was that when ghosts touched a person directly, it changed them and separated them from their society. Eleni had seen things regular people couldn’t and experienced things that defied their reality and religious beliefs, and, frankly, terrified them to a point where they shunned her by reflex. In a way, her relationship with the dead made her a ghost herself, quiet, looming on the outskirts, largely unseen.”

“America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required period exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.”

“Once we become our own ghosts, we constantly ask how we died and who ultimately killed us— we never recall the moment when everything turned against us, how we drowned in the demands of life. Like someone waking from a dream, suddenly wary-eyed and cold, we finally remember that we haunted others and fled our own souls by imitating their lives nearly perfectly, yet death eventually caught up with us. Somehow, we ask ourselves where everyone else has gone and how nothing ever escaped the mind we now possess.”

“Did you look up 'incubus'?" Ren asked, in her ear. She heard a smile in his voice. "Yes. Let's see, 'a lascivious spirit supposed to have sexual intercourse with women in their sleep,' if I remember right." "There. And you thought it wasn't possible. It's common enough they actually had to make up a word for it." "Well, if you've been doing that, then you must have been discreet, because I sure haven't noticed." "It's not my preferred method," he said. "I always wake them up first.”

“Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.”

“Shoulder to shoulder they sit quietly, gazing into the infinity of soul remembrance – an invisible net of breath and devotion generated by the lofty gesture of hundreds of trees arching their way to the sun.  “Eternity gives birth to her most recent legends here, you know,” Grandfather whispers.”

“Patches don’t look it, but when attached to your soul they can get pretty heavy. They go over the holes in your soul, like when you patch a sock. When you have a hole in your soul, it’s because you’re hurting from something. I don’t know if you noticed, but that girl had a lot of holes.”

“The shadow self is what lies beneath the makeup. It’s those ugly parts that you haven’t accepted about yourself. You hide those parts in the shadows until you’re ready.” Her face remained a haunting calm. “When you realize the scars are who you are, that there was nothing wrong with you and that you were beautiful all along - that’s when you decide to take the makeup off.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you at all. Sometimes people say or do things that are mean because there's something the matter with them. With Lydia, it seems there’s always something wrong with her.”

“Because I am, just as you are you. We don’t always get to pick who we are, Shelly Wynn, but we can choose to celebrate it.”

“Soon, all the children were chanting it. “No school! No school!”

“Somehow her hula hoop had cut into the driver’s side door like the vehicle was made of cheese.”

“She could spin it between her legs, skip with it, twirl it around her neck and transfer it from one arm to the other. Shelly hooped because she enjoyed it; it calmed her whenever she would have an argument or a bad day at school, and it also allowed her to think. Today, she needed to hoop more than ever.”

“Shelly shook her head and made sure she had plenty of space so that she wouldn’t hit anything. As many times before, she kept the hoop close to her waist and then twirled it with small, tight bursts of speed. As the hoop gathered in momentum it started to give off a hum that soon took on a light blue illumination far brighter than the streetlamps. It was so bright, that it lit up the entire backyard.”

“I’m afraid they’re not coming.” Abby said fearfully. “Our parents, our teachers – everyone! They’ve disappeared. That’s it. Lights out, Shelly. We’re on our own.”

“Lydia displays her right hand and instantly bathed the room with a blinding light. It lasted only a moment before it drew back into her palm. “I can fix you if you’re ever broken.”

“It’s no big deal. It’s kind of like a tattoo. It won’t hurt, not too much, just a few stitches and it’ll be all over. It’s really interesting how it’s done. You won’t believe where your soul hides. Go on, take a guess. Where do you think it is?”

“Aloha Oukou. It looked like your soul was escaping so I put you in a tree.”