“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”

— Donna Tartt , book The Secret History

Source: The Secret History

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Donna Tartt 64

American writer 1963

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: A fifth kind of semantic awareness has to do with what might be called the "photographic" effects of language. We live in a universe of constant process. Everything is changing in the physical world around us. We ourselves, physically at least, are always changing. Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change. The names we use tend to "fix" that which is named, particularly if the names also carry emotional connotations... There are some semanticists who have suggested that such phrases as "national defense" and "national sovereignty" have been... maintained beyond the date for which they were prescribed. What might have been politically therapeutic at one time may prove politically fatal at another.

“There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 11 (p. 121)

“Ghosts are memories, and we carry them because those we love do not leave the world”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1800s, First Inaugural Address (1801)

“Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them.”

Simon Barnes (1951) British journalist

How To Be Wild (2007)

“We welcome almost any break in the monotony of things, and a man has only to murder a series of wives in a new way to become known to millions of people who have never heard of Homer.”

Robert Wilson Lynd (1879–1949) Irish writer

The New Statesman, 22 October 1921 http://books.google.com/books?id=2UEyAQAAMAAJ&q=%22We+welcome+almost+any+break+in+the+monotony+of+things+and+a+man+has+only+to+murder+a+series+of+wives+in+a+new+way+to+become+known+to+millions+of+people+who+have+never+heard+of+Homer%22&pg=PA70#v=onepage