Ghostly Quotes

“In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“The room was an oasis in a desert of depression.”
― Marilyn Dalla Valle, Westwind Secrets

“The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker.”
― Lafcadio Hearn

“Maggots gnaw on time
Glistening ghostly in dark crevices
As I wait, resigned”
― Erna Grcic, Beneath the Surface

“Taste and smell of rain
and beyond the veil,
your voice,
its trembling overtones
without body or remorse;
these hours
that keep me as an ornament.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“nocturnal goings on like thunder dreams of a dark, dank hunger...like bitter tendrils of ghostly hands forcing you apart, like the boogeyman hiding in the eternal closet, waiting & wanting
you & me too,..”
― Scott C. Holstad, HSTQ: Winter 2025