Quotes about haunt (339 quotes, page 4)

“Where the ring of twilight gleams
Round the sanctuary wrought,
Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
We are one yet know it not.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
Context: Where the ring of twilight gleams
Round the sanctuary wrought,
Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
We are one yet know it not.
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces; some there be
Seek thee only for a song:
I to lose myself in thee.

Dreams

“Life is no negative, or superficial or worldly existence. Our steps are evermore haunted with thoughts, far beyond their own range, which some have regarded as the reminiscences of a preesistent state.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 191
Context: Life is no negative, or superficial or worldly existence. Our steps are evermore haunted with thoughts, far beyond their own range, which some have regarded as the reminiscences of a preesistent state. So it is with us all, in the beaten and worn track of this worldly pilgrimage. There is more here, than the world we live in. It is not all of life to live. An unseen and infinite presence is here; a sense of something greater than we possess; a seeking, through all the void wastes of life, for a good beyond it; a crying out of the heart for interpretation; a memory of the dead, touching continually some vibrating thread in this great tissue of mystery.

Life

“I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

"The Brook", st. 1 (1855)

“The success is various, as the faculties and conditions which God has given are various; but the spectre which haunted the conscience is gone. Our failures are errors, not crimes — nature's discipline with which God teaches us; and as little violations of His law, or rendering us guilty in His eyes, as the artist's early blunders, or even ultimate and entire failures, are laying store of guilt on him.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Finally rises philosophy, which, after a few monstrous efforts from Calvin to Leibnitz to reconcile contradictions and form a theodice, comes out boldly in Spinozism to declare the impossibility of the existence of a power antagonistic to God; and defining the perfection of man's nature, as the condition under which it has fullest action and freest enjoyment of all its powers, sets this as a moral ideal hefore us, toward which we shall train our moral efforts as the artist trains his artistic efforts towards his ideal. The success is various, as the faculties and conditions which God has given are various; but the spectre which haunted the conscience is gone. Our failures are errors, not crimes — nature's discipline with which God teaches us; and as little violations of His law, or rendering us guilty in His eyes, as the artist's early blunders, or even ultimate and entire failures, are laying store of guilt on him.

God , Law , Error , Failure

“The inventor…looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

As appears on plaque in the entrance to the Alexander Graham Bell Museum http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/ns/grahambell/index_e.asp in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, Canada.

World , Idea

“Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Angels , Imagination

“If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind "teased" by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Miss Jewett"
Not Under Forty (1936)
Context: One might say that every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden... It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his "imagination" upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind "teased" by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.

“All my old friends aren't so friendly
And all my old haunts are now haunting me.”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"Laughing with a Mouth of Blood"
Actor (2009)
Context: I traded my plot of land for a plane to anywhere
Oh where did you go.
And I can't see the future but I know it's watching me.
All my old friends aren't so friendly
And all my old haunts are now haunting me.

“We have come by curious ways
To the Light that holds the days;
We have sought in haunts of fear
For that all-enfolding sphere:
And lo! it was not far, but near.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Epilogue
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan
Context: p>We have come by curious ways
To the Light that holds the days;
We have sought in haunts of fear
For that all-enfolding sphere:
And lo! it was not far, but near.We have found, O foolish-fond,
The shore that has no shore beyond.Deep in every heart it lies
With its untranscended skies;
For what heaven should bend above
Hearts that own the heaven of love?</p

Fear , Way , Light

“So mercy, mercy, mercy me

Praying for the death of a man I'll never meet

Though everyone will know the truth they'll still just make believe

Mercy mercy me

That's all they came for, that's all they took

That's all we had to offer, only dirty looks

And when they realized we'd given all we could, that's when they finally understood

Mercy mercy mercy me

Haunted by the memories of things we'll never see

Guilty for the statements that we'll never get to speak

Mercy mercy me

"We can't quite blame it on our mothers

Claim everything they did was always wrong"

And there ain't no turning back when our train is off its track

And there's nothing we can do but watch it crash

And there ain't no right and wrong when we know it won't be long

And there's nothing we can do but watch it crash”

Tomas Kalnoky (1980) American musician

"Watch It Crash" from "Somewhere in the Between" (2007) http://risc.perix.co.uk/lyrics/sm/sitb/05/

Death , Truth , Memory , Training

“But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. Быть одному — ”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Pleasure , Soul

“Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horsewhippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had handset into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end—it was simply a fact of life that operated more slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not.”

Algis Budrys book Michaelmas

Source: Michaelmas (1977), Chapter 3 (pp. 36-37)

Sleep , Time , Night , Housing

“I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope…”

Migdalia Cruz (1958) American writer

On what motivated her to write the play El Grito in “INTERVIEW WITH MIGDALIA CRUZ, PLAYWRIGHT” https://collaboraction.typepad.com/collaboraction/2009/07/interview-with-migdalia-cruz-playwright.html in Collaboraction

Family , Friendship , Hope , Love

“To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage. There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and beasts.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Human Nature a Product of the Jungle", p. 246
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

God , Fear , Time , Beauty

“I am an unhappy man. I am haunted by my inability to express the inexpressible, to come to terms with the unknown. The pursuit of beauty is, of course, a major psychological drive. It its various guises—which is to say, the urge to perfection, the yearning to merge with the eternal, the explorer’s restlessness, the realization of an Absolute created by ourselves, yet larger than our totality—it is perhaps the most important human thrust.”

Jack Vance Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Palace of Love (1967), Chapter 6 (p. 346)

Perfection , Beauty

“I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 22: The Man Alone

Confidence , Law , Dead , People

“The cases in which assistance is given to mankind by nature-spirits are few. The majority of such creatures shun the haunts of man, and retire before him, disliking his emanations and the perpetual bustle and unrest which he creates all around him.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Invisible Helpers (1915), Ch. 4

Nature

“What’s haunting is that the women I met with today told me in no uncertain terms that they would experience retribution for telling us what they shared.They all began sobbing - out of fear of being punished, out of sickness, out of desperation, lack of sleep, trauma, despair.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Twitter, https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1145801283191955464 (1 July 2019)
Twitter Quotes (2019), July 2019

Despair , Sleep , Fear , Women

“I wish that I could believe not in mortality but in reincarnation or individual immortality; I wish that I could be living again in another body or, God help me, even watching from the edge of a fleecy cloud in Heaven or out through the dirty windowpane of a haunted house or through the dull eyes of a dung beetle or on any terms. On any terms I want to be watching, I want to be there, I want to be around, when we reach the stars, when we take over the universe and the universes, when we become the God in whom I do not believe as yet because I do not believe he exists as yet nor will exist until we become Him.”

Fredric Brown book The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

Source: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), Chapter 4 “2000” (p. 242)

God , Housing , Star , Help

“And so Butler made a decision, the consequences of which would haunt his dreams and waking hours for years to come. As a professional bodyguard, he knew the futility of second-guessing his own actions, but in the nights ahead he would often sit by the fire, with his head in his hands, and replay the moment in his mind, wishing that he had acted differently. Whatever way he played it out, the results were tragic, but at least they would not have been tragic for Artemis.”

Eoin Colfer book Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony

Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (2006)

Way , Dreams , Night , Decision

“You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can. But you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer toward ideas that soothe your ego. They make you look for evidence that confirms what you already want to believe. They make you see what you want to see, depending on your mood, and this disconnect from reality is the source of the bad decisions and negative patterns that haunt your life. Rationality is the ability to counteract these emotional effects, to think instead of react, to open your mind to what is really happening, as opposed to what you are feeling. It does not come naturally; it is a power we must cultivate, but in doing so we realize our greatest potential.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 1 : Master Your Emotional Self
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Imagination , Dependency , Fate , Bad luck

“Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.”

Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer

As reprinted in Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (1964; 2014 ebook), ISBN 978-1-101-13722-2, p. 44 https://books.google.com/books?id=d1GqjIhRejMC&pg=PT44.
"Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice" (1963)

Housing , Universe , Self-confidence , Reality

“The sky is colored like a peacock's breast;
There lingers yet one thin, chill line of gold
Down where the woods their somber branches hold
In silhouette against the fading west.
Dark leaves, dark earth, slow-breathing and at rest,
Whence frail scents rise of dew-wet grass and mold.
A single star gleams diamond-clear and cold,
Like one sharp note from elfin viol wrest.
This is the haunted hour,—such woods surround
Grey Merlin in his oak, adrouse with dwale;
In such a gloaming once the lorn knight found
⁠The faery woman in the river-vale;
And underneath this star long, long ago
The Dark Tower heard a lonely slug-horn blow!”

Leah Bodine Drake (1914–1964) American writer

1941, Weird Tales, Vol. 36, p. 105
Haunted Hour

Star , Grass , Color

“In the wake of the pandemic we can be sure that fascists and reactionaries will seek to mobilize tropes of ⁠— racial, national, economic ⁠— purity, purification, parasitism, and pollution to impose their long-festering dreams on reality. The vengeful romance of the border, now more politicized than ever, will haunt all of us in the years to come. The “new” authoritarians, whether they emphasize the totalitarian state or the totalitarian market ⁠— or both ⁠— will insist that we all recognize we now live ⁠— have always lived ⁠— in a ruthless, competitive world and must take measures to wall ourselves in and cast out the undesirable.”

Max Haiven (1981)

No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation (March 23, 2020)

World , Reality , Dreams

“I like ghosts as a metaphor for the outsider. I wish they were real; that would be my preferred afterlife plan. I'd love to observe and haunt with little involvement—I guess that's what being a writer is.”

Porochista Khakpour (1978) American writer

On the appearance of ghosts in Sick in “'THIS BOOK KEPT ME ALIVE': A CONVERSATION WITH POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR” https://psmag.com/social-justice/this-book-kept-me-alive-a-conversation-with-porochista-khakpour in Pacific Standard (2018 Jun 5)

Love , Making love

“I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw [in Ireland] . . . I don't believe they are our fault. . . . But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much. . . .”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

In a letter written from Markree Castle, Sligo to his wife dated July 4th 1860. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memoirs https://archive.org/details/charleskingsleyh00kingiala/page/308 (1877)

Feeling

“For unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering.”

Elizabeth Goudge (1900–1984) English fiction writer

The Scent of Water (1963), Chapter 13.2

Nostalgia , Faith , Suffering

“Going to Bits. This phrase me to day and is indeed the one I have been looking for; not tragic, not mortal disintegration; only a central weakness which prevents me from concentrating or settling down I have so wanted to write and write ahead. The phrase "obligatory creation" has haunted me. I have so wanted to get out of my morning bath promptly: have decided to do so beforehand, and have then lain in it as usual and watched myself not getting out. It looks as if there is a physical as well as a moral break in the orders I send out. I have plenty of interesting thoughts but keep losing them like the post cards I have written, or like my cap. I can't clear anything up yet interrupt a 'good read' in order to clear up. I hope tomorrow to copy out a piece of someone else's prose: it is the best device known to me for taking one out of inself, Plunge into anothers minutiae.'”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

31-1-61

p. 224
Commonplace Book (1985)

Hope , Reading

“No, we didn’t do horror in the sense of haunted houses or people with masks the way you might see them today; something lurking in an anteroom. Our stories were more like peasants sitting around a fire. We had the “Strange World of Your Dreams.””

Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor

Ours didn’t run to bloody horror. Ours ran to weirdness. We began to interpret dreams. Remember, Joe and I were wholesome characters. We weren’t guys that were bent on the weird and the bizarre. We were the kind of guys who wouldn’t offend our mother, who wouldn’t offend anyone in your family, and certainly not the reader. So we knew that we had to depart from adventure and that there were other ways to go and we came up with the “Strange World of Your Dreams”.
Context: page 4 http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/4/ 1990, Gary Groth interview

Housing , Dreams , People , Way

“Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which is attributed to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of London Chatto & Windus, London, (1951) p. 274

Madness , Parting

“Thank God – because what are you going to write about if you don’t struggle as a child? I don’t think that you become creative because you have struggled, no, but creative people are fuelled by anger and passion, and haunted by demons and memories.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

On how her miserable childhood may have inadvertently affected her writing in “The incredible life of Isabel Allende” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/10589928/The-incredible-life-of-Isabel-Allende.html in The Telegraph (2014 Jan 28)

God , People , Memory , Passion

“I think the only responsibility that writers have is to our own truth. If that happens to merge with contemporary issues, then yes, write that truth. But what we are haunted by is not a thing we choose. And that choice is most certainly not made by the latest headlines.”

Shobha Rao

On whether writers have the responsibility to write about contemporary issues in “‘I can’t think of a happier story’: Shobha Rao talks GIRLS BURN BRIGHTER” https://www.booklistreader.com/2018/03/06/books-and-authors/i-cant-think-of-a-happier-story-shobha-rao-talks-girls-burn-brighter/ in Booklist Reader (2018 Mar 6)

Truth , Thinking