Top 93 Ghost Story Quotes
#1. The ghost story movie that scared me the most was The Changeling with George C. Scott. I think that's sometimes overlooked, but it's a wonderful piece of work.
Stephen King
#2. His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.
(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)
Herbert A. Wise
#3. Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is 'ghost story' time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.
Michael Dirda
#4. Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.
Chris Bohjalian
#5. I have to say my favorite stories are ghost stories. I don't like to see these made-up monster films or scary films with ghosts. It doesn't do anything to me. But a real ghost story that someone tells me, that I like.
Sandra Cisneros
#7. I think that the joke and the ghost story both have a similar set up in that you kind of set something up and pay it off with a laugh or a scare.
Simon Pegg
#8. When you read a supernatural suspense story or a ghost story, or a horror story, the evil at play is something that you can dismiss. And I wonder if, in this time, if people really want to be sitting on the subway reading a book about someone releasing a dirty bomb on the subway.
Michael Koryta
#10. We all learn to carry so much unnecessary regret. We drag it around behind ourselves and wear it sewn into the inner lining of our shadow. I think that the heart of every ghost story ever told is awash with the soft faded autumnal color of pure unredeemable regret.
Steve Vernon
#11. But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.
David Mitchell
#12. I think of setting as almost a character of its own, influencing the other characters in ways they're not even aware of. So much of the success of a good ghost story rides on creating a creepy atmosphere; details of the landscape itself can help create a sense of dread.
Jennifer McMahon
#13. These, and many of the other best-known legends of the Rosebud, are false ... the ghost stories of people who have seen too many horror movies and who think they know exactly how a ghost story should be.
Joe Hill
#14. As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of 'Tales of Molokai'. It was she who used to say, 'I myself have seen it,' after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story - a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.
Susanna Moore
#15. I'd sooner believe in a ghost story than believe in love."
"That doesn't matter," I told her. "Love still believes in you.
Natalie Lloyd
#16. History is a ghost story. My own childhood has passed into history, and the ghosts I find there are the ghosts of Heroes and dragons and Berserks and witches, and it has become fashionable not to believe in these things anymore. But I believe, for I was there.
Cressida Cowell
#17. Because every story is a ghost story, even mine.
Samantha Hunt
#18. This is a story about a family and, as there is a ghost involved, you might cal it a ghost story. But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at out tables long after they have gone.
Mitch Albom
#19. Everyone has a ghost story, or at least that's how it has always seemed to me.
John Searles
#20. His face was a ghost story: graveyard eyes, cheekbones as sharp as urban legends, a sealed-coffin mouth.
Allyse Near
#21. I wanted to write a horror story. But in some ways, I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.
Dan Chaon
#22. If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.
Susan Hill
#24. The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body.
Tana French
#26. I've wanted to write a ghost story for years, and my main aim was to write the most frightening ghost story that I could think of.
Michelle Paver
#28. A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!
M.R. James
#29. But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
Guillermo Del Toro
#30. Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.
John Connolly
#31. In a ghost story, usually you've got to hang on until daylight, and you'll be alright. But if daylight's four months away, then you have a problem.
Michelle Paver
#32. I ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course, but you know that ghost-story feeling.
H.G.Wells
#33. no matter it's actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story. A film's production forms a time capsule, becoming a static window into a particular moment of a particular era. Even period pieces tell you more about the times they were made in than the times they depict
Gemma Files
#34. I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.
Susan Hill
#35. Possibly I was mistaken, but it seemed to me that he went pale. At last he muttered, It isn't much of a ghost story, I'm afraid, but then I didn't make it up.
Gene Wolfe
#36. While Max appears to greatly admire Wallace as a writer and feel compassion for him as a man, he is never starry-eyed, or pulls his punches. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of David Foster Wallace's life and work as we can hope to find.
Elissa Schappell
#37. I love to be scared. Not, 'Hey, I think I smell smoke ... ' scared, but creepy, paranoid, what's-that-out-there-in-the-dark, ghost story scared. It's no surprise that I was the girl who got invited to the slumber parties because I could be counted on to tell a tale to scare the bejesus out of you.
Libba Bray
#38. Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill
L.P. Hartley
#39. It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city.
Susan Hill
#40. Strange though it may seem, people rarely show such enthusiasm as when they are seeking the proof of a ghost story - the soul gathers all this sort of thing to its hungry bosom.
Halldor Laxness
#41. The devoutest person could have rendered no greater homage to the efficacy of an honest prayer than he did in this distrust of his wife. It was as if a professed unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost story.
Charles Dickens
#42. Ghosts are a metaphor that can be interpreted so many different ways. There's no ending to what you can do. You can make it a fun ghost story. You can make it a deeply disturbing, psychological ghost story.
Guillermo Del Toro
#43. It always is Christmas Eve, in a ghost story.
("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)
Jerome K. Jerome
#44. I look away, but we've caught each other. And I know this wasn't just a ghost story to him, even if it was to the others.
Jennifer Walkup
#45. I heard your guts had been blasted out," he said to Sebastian. "But since you don't look to be a ghost, I suppose the story was false."
"Actually, it's true," Sebastian replied, his gaze chilling. "But the devil wouldn't have me.
Lisa Kleypas
#46. Long story short, ghosts just coming out of the closet sucked at communication. Probably as bad as a beginner ghost whisperer sucked at getting them to communicate.
C.C. Hunter
#47. I am filled suddenly with hope. I don't think I will ever die. We are looking for ghosts, but, I think, a good story will do.
Tony Earley
#48. The door to his room is open.his face amooth in sleep.Lips relaxed,boys lips, i remember can be so rough, so tender, so sweet.So full of lies.
A.M. Jenkins
#49. Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.
John Boyne
#50. 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.
Pete Wentz
#52. If he is a ghost, then it's very disappointing for me, because he is banished in the story, and that could mean that he won't be coming back, and that would be terrible, wouldn't it?
Paul Darrow
#53. Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage.
Jessica Knoll
#54. I often stood and stared into those tunnels and thought about what happened there; how I was separated from it only by time. - The Procession
Benjamin Brindise
#55. So you know you're a ghost?"
I looked at my hands; they were transparent and glowed faintly. "Can you think of another explanation?
Christina Dodd
#56. [From Old Mortality]
The woman in the picture ... was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.
Katherine Anne Porter
#57. What was the worst thing you've ever done?
I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me ... the most dreadful thing ...
Peter Straub
#58. I knew we were not alone, but there was something in the air, something good and pure that reassured me. It's a beautiful energy, and has been with me ever since.
Caroline Mitchell
#59. I come from a long line of serial embellishers. Sometimes a good story's got a ghost in it; sometimes a panther chases my Uncle Bill and Fred Price home from a coon hunt.
Tony Earley
#60. She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.
Stuart Jaffe
#61. The scratching came from the attic. At night, when Rory turned out the light I would lie awake and wait for it to skit, skit, skit lightly across the floorboards above our heads and down behind the water pipes.
Kate Chisman
#63. This is Lovecraft's best terrible story. It is so artificial...and so overblown...and so ludicrous...that it slithers-through tiramisu-rich prose that might as well be heavy metal lyrics ("a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning")-all the way to the summit of high camp.
Kenneth Hite
#65. (Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.
Howard Kerr
#66. There are some ghost stories in Japan where - when you are sitting in the bathroom in the traditional style of the Japanese toilet - a hand is actually starting to grab you from beneath. It's a very scary story.
Shigeru Miyamoto
#68. This is a work of fiction, and the people in it are fictitious. The ghosts are real.
Nathaniel Benchley
#69. No woman will ever take care of my children but me, she said. I will not allow it, do you understand?
And after I am gone Madge Toxley, if you try to make them yours, then you will live to regret it.
John Boyne
#70. I don't mind UFO's and ghost stories, it's just that I tend to give value to the storyteller rather than to the story itself.
Robert Stack
#71. beneath the stars that drift; she sighed and said
"Every tale of a love
can only be a tale of ghosts that linger
in these spaces we
can never hold," - as the wind
gave echo
John Daniel Thieme
#73. You know, I've always wrote my best stuff when it takes me hardly any time at all. Actually I wrote ... this is actually a really funny story ... 'Ghost Of Vincent Price', I've been wanting to write a song about Vincent Price coz he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
Wednesday 13
#74. There is cruelty in the world Eliza, you can see that, can't you?
It surrounds us. It breathes on us. We spend our life trying to escape it.
John Boyne
#75. Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
#76. The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco.
Susan Hill
#77. And as her voice carried in the darkness, he wasn't sure where the borders between her story and his dream were. But he saw no more nightmares; he dreamed of a noble Sky Ghost and his little daughter, which he taught everything she needed to become a better warrior than he was.
Alexandra Engellmann
#78. We ask our brain to stop worrying, stop obsessing, stop dreaming the same scary dreams again and again. But our brain rarely takes requests.
Dan Poblocki
#79. The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.
Jim Butcher
#80. You are not there, Father," I cried. "I wake up at Gaudlin Hall, I spend most of my day there, I sleep there at night. And throughout it all there is but one thought running through my mind."
"And that is?"
"This house is haunted.
John Boyne
#81. When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?
J.M. Coetzee
#82. It happened during the winter of 1973, when evenings rang out stillborn from far across the weathered moorland, and snow fell hard and heavy and clung atop the peppered veins of nature's tough bracken, all picture-postcard like.
Jordan Mason
#83. As the years passed, it became clear that Alio was a ghost, not an imaginary friend. Imaginary friends have no borders, but ghosts often do.
S. Vest
#84. Because I see
A rainstorm in June
Just before the sun
The black of night
Just before the stars
And, girl, I see your ghost
Just before our dawn
Laura Miller
#85. I cried for all of those things that should have just been for us ...
Kate Chisman
#86. One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness.
Javier Marias
#87. - the rusalka was kneeling beside Plain Kate on the deck. She was made of fog and shadow until Kate caught her eye, and then, all at once, she became human. She was young, mischievously sad, a fox in a story. Kate fell in love with her. And then she was gone.
Erin Bow
#88. There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas - something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.
Jerome K. Jerome
#89. Contrary to popular opinion, a man can shut love out if he wants to. But to do so, he must free himself not only from the woman who has bewitched him but also from the third person in the story, the ghost who has put temptation in his way.
Orhan Pamuk
#90. Everyone has a story to tell but only a few of those who are competent with a gift and drive to master it into a black and white masterpiece and those people are called ghost writers.
Euginia Herlihy
#91. Every ghost has a story. Monsters are nothing without mythology.
Kris Kidd
#92. Mysterious though the ghost may at first appear, he will always be more easily explained than the dismal story in which malevolent people have tried to picture two brothers killing each other who had worshiped each other all their lives. Believe me, etc.
Gaston Leroux
#93. It's not the way I wanted to spend eternity with the man I love, but it will have to do. At least we are together.
Theresa Braun
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