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Haunting Quotes

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Haunting Quotes

“But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.”

MenHeartRealSoulSpiritBehindsGraceFineHauntingLovelinessIneffableSomething Real
Author:James Thurber
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“A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: 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?”

WellsPartyHolyEuropePoliceRadicalCommunismOpponentsOppositionBrandingPopeSpyHauntingAdversariesAlliancesReproachReactionariesCommunist PartyManifestosCommunist ManifestoSpectreCzarsOpposition PartiesMetternich
Book:The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings: & Selected Writings
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“Either the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits.... One should... be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh.”

WorldShouldHumansEndsWholeAbleBeautifulSpiritDesirePurposeOrderImaginationViewsEconomyCenturyMaterialsTerribleShapesLimitsIllusionBoringSurfaceFleshMysteriousAccomplishmentRealmsLatterMortalityHarshHauntingTranscendencePhenomenalConstancy
Author:David Bentley Hart
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“In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burning into baking asphalt.”

IfsBelieveAgeActionMovingWaterMemoriesLove IsFlowCurrentsCornersSmellSeparationOld AgeBurningSandLeafsSighFossilsHauntingBakingVerbsNuanceNounsTrue Love IsDamsTransienceAsphalt
Author:Alyson Richman
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“Why did John Wilkes Booth do it? In My Thoughts Be Bloody young historian Nora Titone is one of the few to have genuinely explored this question. In doing so, she has crafted a fascinating psychological drama about one of the central events of the Civil War: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. This book promises to stimulate lively historical debate, and will be a treat for every Civil War buff who always pondered that haunting question, “what made him pull that trigger?” Bravo on a marvelous achievement.”

MadeBookWarYoungEventsPromiseDramaAchievementTreatsHistoricalDebatePsychologicalCivil WarFascinatingHistorianBloodyMarvelousMy ThoughtsHauntingTriggersAbrahamLivelyAssassinationBravoJohn Wilkes Booth
Author:Jay Winik
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“I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.”

PeopleThinkingFeelsWritingTryingKindMayMeanOrderProcessResponsibilityAudienceCreativeDangerousProveGuiltFinishedRevelationsCollectivesCreative ProcessHauntingHurtfulSense Of ResponsibilityTreading
Author:Rita Dove
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“What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into these footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men? That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures.”

MenHeartLinesPleasureWonderGreaterTreeStreetsAdventurePersonalityFellowsWinterDelightForestsBeastThickFellow ManHauntingStraight LinesTrunksWild BeastsDeviateTree TrunksFootpaths
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
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“The imaginative young vagabond quickly loses the social instincts that help to make life bearable for other men. Always he hears voices calling in the night from far-away places where blue waters lap strange shores. He hears birds singing and crickets chirping a luring roundelay. He sees the moon, yellow ghost of a dead planet, haunting the earth.”

MenHelpingEarthYoungNightSocialVoiceWaterLosesStrangePlanetsCallingMoonSingingBirdBlueInstinctGhostShoreYellowFar AwayCricketImaginativeHauntingLapBearableVagabondsBlue Water
Book:Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography
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“I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.”

PeopleWritingBigsYoungReadingLiteratureSoundImaginationNovelForeverViolenceListeningBandJazzI Have LearnedMy ImaginationHauntingCrystalsSoftnessSaxophoneTenorsUnderstatementColtraneReading NovelsLester Young
Author:Ernest Gaines
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“There's a case in Baton Rouge, haunting me, where a mother left her twelve-year-old daughter to be babysat (every day for months) by a known pedophile and his four perverse friends, and the news broke of the bodies of two children, dead after long-term physical abuse, found in a storage locker in California. What hardest for me is, I suppose, what's hardest for my country”

YearsChildrenLongTwoCountryBodyMotherFoundLeftTermKnownCasesFourMonthsNewsDaughterAbuseHardestBrokeCaliforniaLong TermTwelveHauntingLockersStoragePhysical AbuseRougeBatonBaton Rouge
Author:Laura Mullen
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“I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.”

PeopleThinkingWholeRealityCitiesVisionSeriesPhotographBoxesConsumersNightmareGoodsStationsClosestApartmentHomelessDocumentariesHauntingSubwayTokyoHomeless PeopleCardboard Boxes
Author:William Gibson
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“Anyway, what is a country? When people say, "Tell me about India," I say, "Which India?.... The land of poetry and mad rebellion? The one that produces haunting music and exquisite textiles? The one that invented the caste system and celebrates the genocide of Muslims and Sikhs and the lynching of Dalits? The country of dollar billionaires? Or the one in which 800 million live on less than half-a-dollar a day? Which India?"”

PeopleCountryHalfMillionsLandProduceIndiaMadDollarsCelebrateRebellionGenocideHauntingExquisiteBillionaireCastesLynchingCaste SystemTextiles
Author:Arundhati Roy
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“And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”

WorldUsedChristianityGoneWiseToolsInstinctShipsGoldenGoodsSurvivorCrewHauntingWrecksGuardedRelics
Book:The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”

WayWritingIdeasMatterRoomsBrainOne ThingTerriblePaperDancingLimitationDemonHopelessDiamondImpossibilityHauntingInadequacyWords On Paper
Author:William Goldman
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“There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.”

SoulLightNightMysteryMoonScaryHalloweenHauntingSpookyHappy HalloweenFunny HalloweenScary HalloweenHalloween WishesInspirational HalloweenFunny Happy HalloweenChristian HalloweenHalloween LoveCute HalloweenHalloween TumblrSpooky HalloweenHalloween CardTrick Or TreatMoon Night
Book:Lord Jim
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“At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

SometimesMomentsYoungNightFeltWaitingPoorFrontsLonelinessWindowDinnerRestaurantsTwilightSolitaryHauntingDuskEnchantedClerksPoignantMetropolitan
Book:The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
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“No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.”

FirstsMayMemoriesViewsKnowingWallSightYieldHauntingInviting
Book:Algernon Blackwood: Premium 11 Novels Collection (Jimbo, The Education of Uncle Paul, The Human Chord, The Centaur, The Promise of Air, The Garden of Survival, The Bright Messenger and more)
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