And the bummer thing is, ghosts never leave. They might leave you alone sometimes, but they’re always there deep down, whispering lies in your ear. They echo the lies others told you: That you’re not...

At least that left hope for him. Except “Beauty and the Geek” wasn’t exactly the proper translation of the popular fairy tale.

There’s no way to stand up gracefully when your pants are down around your ankles.

He could not shake the feeling – reportedly common among ghosts – that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

I finally found my way to the Really Restricted Section, where they keep the kind of books most scholars aren’t even supposed to know exist. I knocked on the closed door, said the proper passwords,...

Am I afraid of ghosts? My life experience has taught me to be much more afraid of what a human is capable of in broad daylight than what a ghost is capable of at night.

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out...

It’s called being antisocial.

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population...

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;...

I think they might be mine…?

I wanted to hug him, tell him it was gonna be alright. Tell him I’m not as fragile as I look. But I can’t hug him. I can’t even hold his hand. I can’t tell...

She had golden blazing sun kissed hair, which hung down in loose, lazy spirals, a heart shaped pouted mouth, which was pink tinged with violet blushing, wide, spangled blue eyes that glimmered sparks to flicker...

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help...

Nothing is a masterpiece – a real masterpiece – till it’s about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, you’ve got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same...

I knew I would lose my job when I accidentally set fire to my best friend’s house.

Fucking nightmares.My heart starts to slow down. Glancing down at the floor, I see Tybalt, who is glaring at me with a puffed-up tail. I wonder if he had been sleeping on my chest and...

I see ghosts like you see a normal person. Looking regular, tangible as ever and even more alive than most of the people you’ll see walking around the streets.

After torturing our adrenaline by watching a horror movie for a couple of hours the places we are most afraid of are the doors and windows of the room even though they are the only...

Mama wasn’t dead…exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well...

No ghosts need apply. – Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

Jane sneezed three hundred dollars’ worth of coke into the air.Krishna’s black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat’s.

Jessica’s hand flew to her mouth. If she had any doubt, the next entry settled it.She read on, cool beads of sweat trickling down the back of her neck, hardly daring to breathe as the...

Graveyards were the one place Belladonna never saw ghosts.

Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it’s quite far from one end to the other they...

aren’t always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something...

The popular notion that ghosts are likely to be seen in a graveyard is not borne out by psychical research… A haunting ghost usually haunts a place that a person lived in or frequented while...

And I want to kiss you every day, but not just because I’m saying goodbye.

About the library,” he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page.”Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?” I inquired.He wrote and whispered the words...

Libraries are full of ghosts, books being the most haunted things of all.

The only really frightening thing about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves to remind me that some of them-just a few of them, a tiny minority-are much more dangerous than...

To be or not to be tethered to the sordid, sickly, stinking, sappy apron strings of Hollywood and its endless fondness for fu**ing your sh** up. If Shakespeare were alive today, I bet he’d write...

I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.

We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing...

A familiar pang of dread wrapped its icy hand around my heart.” Lorelei Preston-The Wild Hunt

When you write it, don’t write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don’t try to give an explanation. Just say that I don’t know what to make of it, just write it like...

Eddie made a half-turn in his seat to face her. “So, what did you think of our hosts?”She chuckled. “I think they could be not-too-distant cousins of the Addams Family.””With Paul as a fuzzy Uncle...

It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they...

I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which...

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

I let out a laugh that sounded more like the yip of a startled poodle. “Superp-powers? I wish. My powers aren’t winning me a slot on the Cartoon Network anytime soon… except as a comic...

This was sharing office space with wacko and bordering on ludicrous.

Banks frown when employees torch the home of their principal account holder.

If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he’ll eat all the fish you might have caught for yourself.–Advice of Paul Slater, the evil...

Empty space eventually fills up with something. A void, cultivated in the aftermath of misfortune, begins to attract the wrong kind of attention. Marco knew it was time to leave when disagreeable spirits started roaming...

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high...

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

It’s a big spooky place when you’re in it alone. It’s like you can hear all the whispers of all the voices of all the actors who ever played here. Kind of creepy. Like a...

…most words for ghost are pieces of mica that carefully layeredwill make a window out of fire. It’s cold and the faces at the windowdo what faces usually do they open onto a genetic historythat...

He knows different now. It’s the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we...