Visitation Quotes

“But a smell shivered him awake.
It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive - so alive! And it was close.
The vapors invaded Nicholas' nostrils and his hair rose to their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.
The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to ready be struck and to ring like steel.
A shadow moved.
It poured like oil from between the tall trees and flowed across dark sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. Trees seem to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow...”
― Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path

“The girl's arms jutted out at awkward angles, not quite hands on the hips belligerent but not relaxed either, as if they weren't all the way under the girl's control. "I came to find you."
"I didn't know. If I'd known..."
"It doesn't matter now." The girl's attention was unwavering. "This is where you are."
"It is at that."
The girl looked sad. Her soil-dark eyes were clouded over by tears she hadn't been able to shed. "I came here to find you."
"I couldn't have known." Maylene reached out and plucked a leaf from the girl's hair.
"Doesn't matter." She lifted a dirty hand, fingernails flashing chipped red polish, but she didn't seem to know what to do with her outstretched fingers. Little girl fears warred with teenage bravado. Bravado won. "I'm here now."
"All right, then." Maylene walked down the path toward one of the gates. She pulled the key from her handbag, twisted it in the lock, and pushed open the gate.”
― Melissa Marr, Graveminder

“For it is a truth, that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“The girl's arms jutted out at awkward angles, not quite hands on the hips belligerent but not relaxed either, as if they weren't all the way under the girl's control. "I came to find you."
"I didn't know. If I'd known..."
"It doesn't matter now." The girl's attention was unwavering. "This is where you are.”
― Melissa Marr, Graveminder

“You know very well that no one can enter the heart of another and become as one, not even for the shortest moment. Even your mother only made you flesh, and at your first breath you breathed in solitude”
― Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Morte na Pérsia

“Many people get visited by the Lord in a given time but lack the wisdom to navigate in it.”
― Dr Paul Gitwaza

“we have more than opiates for pain, and we have more than anti-anxiety medication to combat fear and distress. We have the “who” and “what” we see before we die, which is perhaps the greatest comfort to the dying.”
― David Kessler, Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die

“It is required of every man... that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death... It is doomed to wander through the world... and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“I remember the first year after my stepmother’s death. I saw her in everything. It wasn’t on purpose. I wasn’t looking for her, she just showed up. Unexpected and alive and also not alive in my life. I remember walking in Brooklyn and there was a woman who looked just like her… ducking into the Blue Stove bakery and I thought very simply, “Of course. She loves good food.”

And then of course, I knew it wasn’t her, it was only the back of someone’s head really. And then it turned out to be a woman who did not look like her at all.

That’s how it happens, right? All of you who have lost someone, you know it, you’ve seen it. The visitation seems like a gift and also a hard memory of grief.”
― Ada Limon