Ghosts have long haunted the corridors of human imagination, stirring visceral emotions that range from fear to fascination. Across cultures and centuries, these spectral entities have been woven into the fabric of storytelling, as mysterious echoes of the past or eerie reminders of mortality. In this curated collection of the top 42 quotes about ghosts, we delve into the ethereal and unknown, offering insights from authors, poets, and luminaries who have all felt the unshakeable presence of the supernatural. Whether you view ghosts as figments of imagination or believe in their haunting reality, these quotes will inspire a spirited reflection on the unseen forces that linger just beyond the veil.
1. “Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.” - Salman Rushdie
2. “Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?” - Brenna Yovanoff
3. “I assure you; while I look like a ghost, I'm no spirit or demon. I'm nothing but a girl struggling to make her way in an intolerant world. I bleed, I love, and someday, I'll die.” - Leanna Renee Hieber
4. “I think locality exercises strange influence over some minds. The peaceful meadow-scenery holds no lurking horrors in its bosom, but in the lonesome moorlands, full of curiously molded boulders, grotesque fancies must assail one there. Creatures seem to come, odd and ill-defined as their surroundings. As a child I had a peculiar horror of those tall, odd-shaped boulders, with seeming faces, featureless, it is true, but sometimes strangely resembling humans and animals. I believe the spinney may be haunted by something of this nature, terrible as the trees. ("The Haunted Spinney")” - Elliott O'Donnell
5. “I'd say we're all just ghosts on a wire seeking the prick of an electric thought.” - Robert Fanney
6. “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.—address to the Society for Psychical Research in England” - C.G. Jung
7. “He was trying to tell me something."Derek snorted. "Aren’t they all? Must be a rule in the ghost handbook—if in danger of evaporating, make sure you’re in the middle of a dire pronouncement.” - Kelley Armstrong
8. “Oh, very good,' interrupted Snape, his lip curling. 'Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. 'Ghosts are transparent.” - J. K. Rowling
9. “Okay. When he comes, you can see him?""Yes. I can hear him, too. And he, uh..."She brushed the bandage on the side of her skull. I looked at her in bewilderment. Was she serious?"He hits you?""Yes.""With his fist?""Yes."John looked up from his coffee indignantly. "Man, what a dick!"I did roll my eyes this time and glared at John once they stopped. I don't know if you've ever seen a ghost, but I'm guessing that if you did, the thing didn't run over and punch you in the face. I'm guessing that's never happened to any of your friends, either.” - David Wong
10. “Ghosts have a way of misleading you; they can make your thoughts as heavy as branches after a storm.” - Rebecca Maizel
11. “Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.” - Neil Gaiman
12. “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.” - Hilary Mantel
13. “Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalised ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many … can be recalled by name. But they are not the living-dead. There is a difference.” - James W. Loewen
14. “It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years” - Tim Cummings
15. “Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")” - Tim Cummings
16. “Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it.” - John Steinbeck
17. “Graveyards were the one place Belladonna never saw ghosts.” - Helen Stringer
18. “GhostsTake shape under moonlight,materialize in dreams.Shadows. Silhouettesof what is no more. Butghosts don'tbother me. The day bringsbigger things to worry aboutthan flimsy remains ofyesterday. No, spooks don'tscare me.Gauzy apparitions mightprank your psyche oragitate your nightmares,but lackingflesh and bloodthey are powerlessto hurt you-cannot hopeto inflict the kind of damagethat real, livepeople do.” - Ellen Hopkins
19. “In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions.' Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts.' ("Village Ghosts")” - W.B. Yeats
20. “The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.” - Tahir Shah
21. “It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.” - Banana Yoshimoto
22. “Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after- lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.” - Stephen King
23. “Aura," he whispered, "I wish I could wipe away just one of your tears. Then I'dfeel like a person again. Like I'm something more than a bunch of light.” - Jeri Smith-Ready
24. “...she knew, with all her heart that running away from the country’s top relationship coach was as good as saying, 'there’s no hope for me, ever'!” - Diane Hall
25. “You fuck - you ate my cat!” - Kendare Blake
26. “No ghosts need apply. - Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” - Arthur Conan Doyle
27. “Sometimes we just have to accept the fact we can't explain everything. Life happens, whether we want it to or not and we don't always have a reason why. Our job is to try and make some good come out of it.” - Melissa Pearl
28. “The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil, or spirit, might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?” - Louis L'Amour
29. “Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.” - Donald Harington
30. “Some ghosts or felt presences may simply be the essence of another living person projected outward while sleeping.” - Doug Dillon
31. “Southampton's barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.” - Elizabeth Wein
32. “The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.” - Rob Montgomery
33. “Being dead does have its advantages.”-Alastor” - Dana Michelle Burnett
34. “We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.” - Liam Callanan
35. “Maybe she'd seen too many Japanese horror movies, and maybe it was just a tingle of warning from generations of superstitious ancestors, but suddenly she knew that what Alyssa wanted was not to be saved, but for Shane to join her. In death.” - Rachel Caine
36. “Dear Miranda Silver,This house is bigger than you know! There are extra floors, with lots of people in them. They are looking people. They look at you, and they never move. We do not like them. We do not like this house, and we are glad to be going away. This is the end of our letter.” - Helen Oyeyemi
37. “You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically... a ghost bus?! The “ghost” of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn't head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in... bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they... I don't know, break down, but instead is doomed to … drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?!” - Paul Cornell
38. “His kiss was like no other! His kiss was enchanted and fairy-tale like. He applied pressure, but just enough to feel his tenderness and warmth. I could feel his heart beating wildly as he pressed his chest against my chest all the while his loving lips brushed up against mine with a care-filled affection. His tongue lightly licked the outer edges of my mouth, and then searched for my tongue. The pursuit allowed a marriage of both tongues to meet - inspiring a mingling tango of hot and heavy French kissing to manifest profusely. We kissed like two hot and horny teenagers, our mouths moving and craving each others lips, in animalistic desires!” - Keira D. Skye
39. “Hello?” I ask. No one is there. Not a word. Not a whisper. Not a single sound resonating from the other side of the receiver. “Hello? Anyone there?” I ask again. Repeating myself. I am beginning to feel rather anxious now. Scared, would be a better word to use. Shivers have begun to creep up my spinal cord, and I can feel the urgency of goose pimples begin to line up on by frightened pale skin.” - Keira D. Skye
40. “Don't tell me how to grieve. Don't tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don't, heartbreak like these doesn't.” - Anthony Doerr
41. “The diamonds glinted under the glare of the chandelier and they looked like a thousand spider eyes” - Kate Chisman
42. “Do ghosts drink tea?They don't, said Tansey. But this ghost would love to see a cup of tea in front of her. It'd be lovely.” - Roddy Doyle
