Apparitions Quotes - Page 2

• The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Ministry

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.61, Harvard University Press

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• It is with sincere affection or friendship as with ghosts and apparitions,--a thing that everybody talks of, and scarce any hath seen.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Affection, Ghost, Sincerity

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• Ghosts Take shape under moonlight, materialize in dreams. Shadows. Silhouettes of what is no more. But ghosts don't bother me. The day brings bigger things to worry about than flimsy remains of yesterday. No, spooks don't scare me. Gauzy apparitions might prank your psyche or agitate your nightmares, but lacking flesh and blood they are powerless to hurt you-cannot hope to inflict the kind of damage that real, live people do.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Dream, Hurt, Real

  Ellen Hopkins (2013). “Perfect”, p.61, Simon and Schuster

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• Know all things to be like this: A mirage, a cloud castle, A dream, an apparition, Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen. Know all things to be like this: As the moon in a bright sky In some clear lake reflected, Though to that lake the moon has never moved. Know all things to be like this: As an echo that derives From music, sounds, and weeping, Yet in that echo is no melody. Know all things to be like this: As a magician makes illusions Of horses, oxen, carts and other things, Nothing is as it appears.

  Gautama Buddha

  Dream, Buddhist, Horse

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• A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.

  Hollis Frampton

  Angel, Devil, Faces

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• We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."

  Joan Didion

  Husband, Self, Psychosis

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• Suddenly, as though in a dream, this apparition, this double apparition, approached me. The two most beautiful people in the world were floating toward me, smiling. It was as if they were angelic visitors. I thought to myself, 'If there is anything I can do to keep them as beautiful as they are, I will do it.'

  Gilbert Seldes

  Beautiful, Dream, Two

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• White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.

  Dieter Appelt

  Photography, Light, Color White

  Sylvia Wolf, Dieter Appelt, Wieland Schmied (1994). “Dieter Appelt”, Art Institute of Chicago

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• Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden, That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Children, Men, Garden

  'Prometheus Unbound' (1819) act 1, l. 191

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• Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Dream, Fall, Eye

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.116, Macmillan

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• The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.

  Thomas Paine

  Jesus, Believe, Imagination

  Thomas Paine (1830). “The Theological Works of Thomas Paine: To which are Added the Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar”, p.138

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• Glendower: I can call the spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come, when you do call for them?

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Spirit, Hotspur

  'Henry IV, Part 1' (1597) act 3, sc. 1, l. [53]

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• Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

  A. S. Byatt

  Dream, Song, Morning

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Aug 27, 2011

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• I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.

  John Shelby Spong

  Easter, Moving, Religion

  John Shelby Spong (1994). “Resurrection: myth or reality? : a bishop's search for the origins of Christianity”, Harpercollins

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• Most of us had never seen a sober redneck before, and we have the Reagan Landslide to testify that none of us ever wants to see one again. It was a horrifying apparition. And ever since Jimmy Carter, all of us rednecks have had to be very careful to be drunk rednecks lest we turn into some kind of awful creature with big buck teeth and a State Department full of human-rights yahoos.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Redneck, Rights, Drunk

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• we'll have to reclaim the ward 'taxes.' Why has it become a synonym for 'evil'? I understand that no one likes to pay good money for nothing. But fire and police protection aren't nothing. ... Roads, bridges, airports, and mass transit systems aren't nothing. National parks, clean air, and clear water aren't nothing. A safe food supply, functioning schools with well-trained teachers, and well-equipped hospitals aren't vaporous apparitions either.

  Arianna Huffington

  Teacher, School, Bridges

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• Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.

  Octavio Paz

  Real, Criticism, Analysis

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.31, Arcade Publishing

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• You could analyze me and say that my father leaving and being absent was a motivator for early ambition, trying to prove myself to this apparition who had vanished. You could argue that me being a mixed kid in a place where there weren't a lot of black kids around might have spurred on my ambitions. You could go through a whole litany of things that sparked me wanting to do something important.

  Barack Obama

  Father, Ambition, Kids

  Source: www.vanityfair.com

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• I see the relationship sincerity/humor differently. Instead of seeing a balance between them, I see them more inextricably linked, as if one is the hard candy shell that gives to the other, or one is the apparition, the ghost-image that invokes the other.

  Alex Lemon

  Giving, Balance, Shells

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The image wanders ghostlike through the present. Ghostly apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed.

  Siegfried Kracauer

  Deeds, Wander, Terrible

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• Richard Pilbrow's lighting can turn a coin into an asteroid and an idea into an apparition.

  Jack Kroll

  Ideas, Asteroids, Coins

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• The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.

  Tennessee Williams

  Men, Play, Ideas

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• On the Night of the Halloween, I have never seen any evil apparition or fearsome ghost, but politicians on TV! They are the real goblins and specters!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Real, Halloween, Night

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• The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Attitude, Air, Cities

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