“Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.”

“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”

“All ghost stories come to this, she understood. All ghost stories end in one of two ways: You are dead or I am dead. If people only understood this, Portia thought, they would never be frightened, they would only need to ask themselves, Who among us has died?And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.”

“This story never really had a point. It’s just a lull - a skip in the record. We are addresses in ghost towns. We are old wishes that never came true. We are hand grenades (and every word you say pulls the pin). We are all gods, we are all monsters.”

“The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always- greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.”

“Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”