The Haunted Baronet and Others Quotes

“There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70

“Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy that the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part, I hate boating and I hate the water...”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70

“There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70

“What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70

“No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70

“Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,' said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; 'and people too; population shifts – there's an old fellow, sir, they call Death.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70