Paranormal Mystery Quotes

“Allow the power to flow through you. Don’t try to capture it. You wish only to borrow it.”
― G.G. Collins, Reluctant Medium

“The wolf turned to Rachel. She was afraid to run, afraid fleeing would make it chase her. Somewhere in the stored files of her mind, she remembered one should not look directly at a menacing dog, but she couldn’t take her eyes from it.”
― G.G. Collins, Reluctant Medium

“James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“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, Chasing Azrael

“I swore as the knife I’d been using to dice our dinner bit into my finger. I dropped it on the floor, blood spattering the counter and cupboard doors a furious red. I watched, mesmerised, as the blood welled up and began to seep down my hand; I tried to catalogue the amount of pain I was in. Surprisingly little, I concluded, pushing at the edges of the wound to see how deep it went. Deep enough. I was starting to feel it now, but it didn’t hurt so much. I’d endured far worse.
If it came to it, I could do it. There was comfort in that knowledge.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“Was James bipolar?”
The tears returned, and I watched her battle them. “We don’t use that word in our family.”
I stared at her for a moment. “Why not?”
“Mum and Dad don’t believe in it.” She kept walking. “James was always … troubled. But there was nothing wrong with him, nothing more than anyone else anyway, everyone feels a bit down sometimes.”
“Olivia! It was more than feeling down.”
She laughed, bitterly. “I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“Joshua had always been able to get away with things—things for which he should never have been forgiven. He was a lot like James in that respect, for while my husband had bought his grace with his brilliance, Joshua did so with his looks. I considered that a moment, before turning away, suddenly finding I could not bear to look at him for fear of what I might forgive next.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.
James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“It seemed for a moment as if something was there, loitering between the knurled and towering cherry trees, a flash of a presence as stark as the sight of the snow against their bare branches and cracked, piceous bark. Unblinking, I watched the edge of the lake, waiting for it to reappear, but whatever it had been was gone, vanished under cover of a willow tree, lofty and dense, rearing over the lake, its branches dripping all the way to the ground. The tree’s lament had been transformed into a thing of such beauty I was tempted to go and hide within it.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“At the time, Margaret had been very angry with God, angry that all she had left of her mother was the promise of a ring.”
― Diana Stevan, A Cry From The Deep

“She stood in the snow, effervescent, all pale skin and blonde hair, clad in white and bathed in moonlight. She should have looked angelic, instead she looked like a corpse, freshly raised from the grave, frosted in ice and darkness, swaying precariously in a graveyard.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“I found serenity in the towers, especially the highest, even in the midst of winter. The crows also enjoyed the lofts, and I habitually fed them.
Often I held conference with the grotesques lining the summit. The gryphon was perhaps my favourite. I’d regularly sat beside them when feeling pensive, even before James’s death, one leg dangling precariously over the edge”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.
For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment.
Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other …”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“Pushed times make a monkey chew pepper.~ Creole proverb. (challenging times inspire unique actions)”
― Myra Jolivet

“You tickle my fancy, and I don’t need anything on TV to help with that.”
― Mia Bishop, Sweet as Clover

“A shade flickered to my left, an eerie shadow balanced even more precariously on the railing than I. Her plimsolls struggled to grip the same rail my fingers now held. I knew her face, just as I knew her death; I’d watched it often enough, those times I’d been unable to avoid crossing here. Nerys was always here, tied to the moment of her death, an echo, forever hurtling down into those waters, only to reappear an instant later, once more wavering on the rails.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“In the distance, steel-blue mountains loomed heavy on the horizon, their shoulders burdened with the same accursed snow the gods were currently depositing upon the lowlands. Between us and the mountains, the vast expanse of one of the innumerable caravan sites littering the Welsh shores was dimly visible, and at the far edges of the sands, grey waves tipped a mulch of brown foam up on to the beach, a sudden deposition of wishy-washy creatures that seemed to spider-leg over each other in their haste to reach the shore and see what all the fuss was about.
But even these creatures comprised of sea-foam were freaked out by the death-stare, for the little critters swiftly dissipated under the force of a skeletal glower.
A skull lay in the sand, its empty sockets staring down the beach at the retreating surge. Their fear wouldn’t last long. Soon they’d realise the skeleton had not engaged in pursuit, their confidence would grow, and they’d encroach, further and further up the bank. Eventually, they’d be close enough to see it was completely inert, and would overrun our position, victoriously sweeping up their fallen foe and dragging it back out with them into the dreary waves.”
― Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael

“You’re a ghost, Nick. A ghost. I don’t know how it’s possible or if it is possible. Even if I didn’t imagine the whole situation, it’s never happening again.”
― Mia Bishop, Sweet as Clover

“A man named Lucky walked into my pawnshop carrying a skull and a pie tin.

The skull was not in the pie tin, to be fair, but it was not the kind of thing I took in for pawn, either.

It was human.

"Please tell me that's fake," I said, torn between competing impulses to clutch my head or call the sheriff.

Lucky, who had a super cute, blue-eyed, blond-haired, boy-next-door thing going on, but with muscles that showed he just happened to be ex-Special Forces, squinted at me. "No, it's not fake, it's the pan from the pecan pie you baked for Molly last week. She asked me to drop it by."

I took a long, deep, breath. "No. The skull. Please tell me the skull is fake. Halloween decoration you want to pawn, maybe?"

He laughed. "Oh. Sorry. No, it's real. I'm on my way to find the sheriff and thought I'd drop off your pan. I didn't want to leave the skull in the car because what if someone broke into my car and stole it?"

I stared at him for a moment, because what were the odds that someone would:

1) break into his car, and
2) break into his car at the exact time there happened to be a skull in it, and
3) break into his car at the exact time there happened to be a skull in it and decide to steal the skull.”
― Alyssa Day, Apple of My Eye

“The great edifice of the Belfontaine Hotel loomed up out of the darkness and spitting snow and swallowed me whole, like a giant in a fairytale swallowing a fool.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Ask your dream characters questions.
They know something you do not know.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“Don’t worry,” Turner says, her voice taking on the matronly air she reserves for small children and young men. “Stupider men than you have gone through this ritual, and they’ve all succeeded, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Um, thank you?”
― L E Medlock, The Agent's Demon

“Don’t worry,” Turner says, her voice taking on the matronly air she reserves for small children and young men. “Stupider men than you have gone through this ritual, and they’ve all succeeded, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Um, thank you?”
― L.E. Medlock, The Agent's Demon

“I steel myself and look up. And up. The demon is a head taller than me. That realisation sticks in my mind and for a moment I don’t realise what has happened, why shocked whispers are ricocheting off the walls. Then I understand. The demon is male. I haven’t called a Hound at all.”
― L.E. Medlock, The Agent's Demon

“His eyebrows arch in a look born of condescension. The condescension isn’t important. It matters little what he thinks of me, as long as he can do his job. That sharp, lovely face is nothing more than a reminder of what he is: in the devil’s children, beauty is not to be trusted.”
― L.E. Medlock, The Agent's Demon

“These people...” Steel murmurs. “Why are they all here? Don’t they have...?” He makes an oblique gesture, as though the words he wants can’t fit into one sentence.

“They’ve nowhere else to go, Mr. Steel,” I reply. “The Empire takes chunks of the world for itself, promising protection and safe haven in exchange for the scars it leaves behind. When people draw upon that promise, this is what they’re rewarded with.”
― L.E. Medlock, The Agent's Demon

“The demon watches me slide the pin back into my hair. “Is that a blade in your hat?” he whispers.

“It’s a pin.” Never underestimate the power of a lady’s toilette, Turner had told me once.”
― L.E. Medlock, The Agent's Demon

“Look, whoever it is must be planning an elaborate countdown to Halloween,” Remy deduced, leaning back in his chair, his eyes bright with amusement. “Thirteen days, thirteen scares. The Rougarou is just the opener. You’ll probably get something lame like ‘Two bats’ tomorrow.”
― Alexis Marie LaRue, The Thirteen Days of Bayou Frights

“I often feel like I'm simply haunting the world I inhabit.”
― Michael Poeltl, The Haunting of Grosvenor House