ghosts

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

We are the voices in the shadows,Between the light and shade,Betwixt life and restful death,In the dark periphery of the unseen.We__e here, At the edges. We are the villainous punished,The innocent murdered or abandoned,Our lives ended by foul means, or unspeakable deeds.We are your lovers long gone; your siblings forsaken.Can you hear us?At the edgesFrom the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she__ fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.

This had always been the worst time when the quiet emptiness could leave him gasping for breath. She was there, his wife, a peripheral shadow moving across a doorway, or in the reflection of a window, and he had to stop looking for her. And the whiskey helped _ helped him walk past her when the fire was doused. But occasionally she followed him up the stairs and that__ why he began to take the bottle with him, because she stood in the corner of their bedroom and watched him undress, and when he was on the verge of sleep, she leant over him and asked him things like, Remember when we first met?

When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son

Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.

Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face,but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wingsagainst the pane in the boarded-up house.

Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.

Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after- lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.

I turned to him and he reached for my hand. It would have been easier to walk away. But the wind still blew around us and the house still stood.

Darkness can inspire light, and light can inspire darkness, its just a difference of distant of these two contrasting forces.

Believe that you are someone worth saving.

There is no place so dark that light cannot lead the way.

Healing cannot occur by refusing to listen to the truth, unsettling as it may be.

The difference in our potential as angels or demons is the effect of time on the decisions we make.

He locked the doors and windows and sat in the middle of a room afraid of going out there in the storm and rain, in the darkest night he had ever seen. All of a sudden there were knocks everywhere and the walls turned into the glass so that he could helplessly witness his fears approach him like the ghosts. He saw them crawling on the wall and climbing the roof staring into his eyes, in no time the walls disappeared and they stood around him laughing and consuming him one by one at a time. all he saw, in the end, was the ugly and scary faces of himself.

The main thing about ghosts _ most of them have lost their voices. In Asphodel, millions of them wander around aimlessly, trying to remember who they were. You know why they end up like that? Because in life they never took a stand one way or another. They never spoke out, so they were never heard. Your voice is your identity. If you don__ use it,_ Nico said with a shrug, __ou__e halfway to Asphodel already.__He hated when his own advice applied to himself.