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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Felicity ignores us. She walks out to them, an apparition in white and blue velvet, her head held high as they stare in awe at her, the goddess. I don't know yet what power feels like. But this is surely what it looks like, and I think I'm beginning to understand why those ancient women had to hide in caves. Why our parents and suitors want us to behave properly and predictably. It's not that they want to protect us; it's that they fear us.

  Libba Bray

  Thinking, White, Blue

  Libba Bray (2010). “A Great and Terrible Beauty”, p.132, Simon and Schuster

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• Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dream, Sleep, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1904). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: With a Biographical Introduction and Notes”

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• Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages

  Isabel Allende

  Character, Grandmother, Care

  Isabel Allende (2003). “My invented country: a memoir”, HarperPerennial

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• Starting with approaching the spot where the painting is to be done, meanwhile realising the emptiness of the mind, up to the method of 'the flying white', of the rule of the singular stroke of the brush.. ..there is a proper tradition in which the artist is fully aware of the fact that only the pure and empty spontaneity enables him to embrace without hesitating all apparitions and to truly penetrate into the roots of things.

  Antoni Tapies

  Artist, Roots, White

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 38), 2004.

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• I came home from Portugal convinced that nothing is so important as making known what the Mother of God asked in those apparitions of 1917 . . . The future of our civilization, our liberties, our very existence may depend upon the acceptance of her commands.

  William Thomas Walsh

  Mother, Home, Acceptance

  William Thomas Walsh (1947). “Our Lady of Fátima”

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• I found everything so remote but, at the same time, familiar when I occasionally looked into the mountains, rocks, pine trees and plums depicted in old literati paintings. My innermost feeling which was awakened by the same mountains, rocks, pine trees and plums has been totally and utterly changed. Moreover, like an apparition, it hides deep down in my vessels. The very trees and rocks have become the storage of memories and emotions from various eras. Forced by the rapid change of time and perspective, I cannot help but feel urged to face up to these things once again.

  Zhang Xiaogang

  Memories, Rocks, Perspective

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• Our EMF meter was jumping off the charts. We found her alarm clock was causing crazy electro-magnetic fields around it. We spent $22.99 on a nice digital clock, and she never saw an apparition again.

  Jason Hawes

  Nice, Crazy, Jumping

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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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• This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.

  Andrzej Stasiuk

  Country, Names, Fiction

  Andrzej Stasiuk (2009). “Fado”

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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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• 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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