"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." H.P. Lovecraft
"For two hours I sat there, thinking of bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning half-forgotten faces out of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy, to voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar songs that nobody sings now." ~ Mark Twain
"Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them." ~ Edgar Allan Poe
"Though they don't always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you've got to turn the screw very, very slowly." Susan Hill
"Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch." ~ Yehuda HaLevi
“(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.” ~ Howard Kerr
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." ~ Vladimir Nabokov
“Abandoned houses seldom turn out to be as empty as they appear. Voices fade, but echoes linger, intimately, sinking from room to room. And sometimes figures emerge from those shadows, if only in dreams. What could be more profoundly idiosyncratic than our nightmares? Always, there has been something personal about ghost stories. How surprising is it that so many concern writers in torment?” ~ Robert Dunbar
“I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.” ~ H.R. Wakefield
“Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.”~Hazel Butler
“St. Augustine is not only the oldest continuously-occupied European settlement on the American continent, it is also perhaps the most haunted city in the United States. Seemingly every spot in this city has some ghostly hidden history, right below the surface. Just by strolling through the historic streets you can hear the whispers of the long-dead.” ~ James Caskey
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” ~ Shirley Jackson
"I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost stories, and discovered a taste for spinning yarns." Algernon Blackwood
"Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts." Brian Aldiss
"Halloween isn't the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter's tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee." Michael Dirda
"There'll be scary ghost stories, And tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago" ~It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
"I Do Not Believe in Ghosts, But I Am Awfully Afraid of Them" ~ Madame de Stael
"I love ghost stories. I remember when I was about 12, I read M. R. James' 'Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary' under the covers, way too young to fully understand what was going on with those stories, completely terrified but absolutely loved them." Tom Goodman-Hill
"Today's ghost stories tend to be much more physically or psychologically violent. The Victorians were much more leisurely about what might or could happen, building suspense layer by layer rather than punching you in the face." Otto Penzler
"The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise." Erica Jong
"Webs are made mostly of spaces. They break easily. They barely exist. They belong to the category of half-things: mist, smoke, shrouds, ghosts, membranes, retinas or rags; and they quickly fill up with un-things: old legs and wings and heads and hollow abdomens and body bags of wasps." Alice Oswald
"For 'Ghostbusters,' the thing that makes it such an amazing franchise and an amazing idea is that it is adds the element of physics and technology. It's not just about ghosts. Who the heck came up with that? It is such a good idea, such a unique combination of stuff from different genres. Ghosts and sci fi." Kate McKinnon
"The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields." Alexandra Adornetto
“Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed.
But death is never the end.
It is the beginning.” ~Hazel Butler
“A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night.” ~ J.M. Barrie
"The Supernatural is the Natural, just not yet understood." ~ Elbert Hubbard
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