Ghosts

A person terrified with the imagination of spectres, is more reasonable than one who thinks the appearance of spirits fabulous and groundless. – Joseph Addison

An idea, like a ghost (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself. – Attributed to Dickens in Many Thoughts of Many Minds by Henry Southgate, 1862

Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted. – Emily Dickinson, 1876

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. – Brian Aldiss

The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard, as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. – Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl. – H.L. Mencken

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it. – Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell

Whatever its origin, a belief in spirits seems to have been common to all the nations of the ancient world who have left us any record of themselves. Ghosts began to walk early, and are walking still, in spite of the shrill cock-crow of wir haben ja aufgeklÃ¤rt. – James Russell Lowell, “Witchcraft”

He stood looking after them… as though he had perceived that they had come back accompanied by a ghost a-piece. – Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night. – J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister, 1891

An author, ridiculing the idea of ghosts, asks, how a dead man can get into a locked room. Probably with a skeleton-key. – G.D. Prentice

But it is presumptuous to scrutinize too far into these matters: Ghosts have undoubtedly forms and customs peculiar to themselves. – Francis Grose, “Superstitions: A Ghost,” A Provincial Glossary, with a Collectio

As surely as you are a living man, so surely did that spectral anatomy visit my room again last night, grin in my face, and walk away with my trousers: nor was I able to spring from my bed, or break the chain which seemed to bind me to my pillow. – Thomas Ingoldsby, “The Spectre of Tappington,” 1837

Love, thieves, and fear, make ghosts. – German Proverb

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. – Robert Louis Stevenson

The weathercocks on spires and housetops were mysterious with hints of stormy wind, and pointed, like so many ghostly fingers, out to dangerous seas, where fragments of great wrecks were drifting, perhaps, and helpless men were rocked upon them into a sleep as deep as the unfathomable waters. – Charles Dickens, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son