Ghost In The Headlights Quotes

Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.

I took my bike instead of the car so I wouldn’t wake Mom. I remember it started to rain and then I saw headlights coming when I turned the corner. I tried to get out of the way, but it all just happened so fast I couldn’t stop.

In the mountains they saw deer in the headlights and in the headlights the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless. They turned their red eyes toward this unreckoned sun and sidled and grouped and leapt the bar ditch by ones and twos. A small doe lost her footing on the macadam and scrabbled wildly and sank onto her hindquarters and rose again and vanished with the others into the chaparral beyond the roadside.

I was not able to sleep that night. To be honest, I didn’t even try. I stood in front of my living room window, staring out at the bright lights of New York City. I don’t know how long I stood there; in fact, I didn’t see the millions of multicolored lights or the never-ending streams of headlights and taillights on the busy streets below. Instead, I saw, in my mind’s eye, the crowded high school classrooms and halls where my friends and I had shared triumphs and tragedies, where the ghosts of our past still reside. Images flickered in my mind. I saw the faces of teachers and fellow students I hadn’t seen in years. I heard snatches of songs I had rehearsed in third period chorus. I saw the library where I had spent long hours studying after school. Most of all, I saw Marty. Marty as a shy sophomore, auditioning for Mrs. Quincy, the school choir director. Marty singing her first solo at the 1981 Christmas concert. Marty at the 1982 Homecoming Dance, looking radiant after being selected as Junior Princess. Marty sitting alone in the chorus practice room on the last day of our senior year. I stared long and hard at those sepia-colored memories. And as my mind carried me back to the place I had sworn I’d never return to, I remembered.

Simone crossed herself and prayed as she watched headlights coming at them, fast and furious. Her hands shaking from fright, she buckled herself in while Jesse screamed out like a terrified child in the back seat. As if he could die.

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream.

My dad loved telling ghost stories from the times he went camping with his father in Sweden. In one story they were driving on a country road at night and kept having to stop because they'd see feet crossing the road in their headlights. My grandfather would get out of the car, confused as to why there were so many people at night in the countryside, and see no one. As the story went, after this happened a few times he finally saw several pairs of feet stopped, facing the car, at close range. He got out again and saw no people, only the remains of a bridge that had collapsed. As I type this now I get thoughts like "They never owned a car!" and "I know for a fact when they camped they took the bus!" and "What kind of headlights only show you the road at feetlevel?" But at the time the moral of the story was always "Ghosts are real!" and to a lesser extent "Dead Swedes are concerned about traffic safety!

Like a ghostly vision, a stone gatehouse arched high over the road, and as Jenny gazed at it in surprise, a tall shadow pulled slowly from the niche in the wall and calmly blocked their way, keeping just beyond reach of the headlights.

A month had passed since Roz left the island. According to her calculations, she had traveled hundreds of miles, but she still had hundreds more to go. The tireless robot continued north, on and on, toward the waters where the Ancient Shark roamed. If you travel far enough north, you’ll reach an area where the sun never sets in summer. And Roz had traveled far enough north. Up at the surface, there was constant daylight, all day, every day, until autumn. However, our robot was at a depth below the reach of the sun. And yet there were occasional glimmers. Certain deep-sea fish had glowing fins, while others had glowing teeth, and still others had spindly glowing lures that dangled from their heads. Jellyfish came in every shape imaginable, and many of them gave off a ghostly light. Most gleaming creatures kept their distance. Roz would see a flicker, and as her headlights swept toward it, the creature vanished into the murky haze. She was marching down a long slope that descended to the deepest trenches of the ocean when she felt her Survival Instincts tingling. The weight of all the water above was becoming too great. If she went much deeper, she’d be crushed from the pressure. So Roz stopped marching downhill and started swimming at a safer depth, and the ocean floor quickly faded from view. The robot’s limbs paddled automatically, which left her mind free to wander. Specks of debris floated all around, like a gentle snowfall, and suddenly she was recalling the snowfalls she’d experienced on land. She thought

It was past midnight when the doctor from Stellenbosch drove splashing through the drift. Warned by the beam of his car’s headlights, which dredged up, as it were, the white ghost of the house from depths of a dense, hot darkness, Hans Malan stalked out on to the stoep to meet him.

He watched the ghostly army on the march. Headlights swept the immigrants. The concrete gleamed wet and black beneath their boots and gym shoes. His countrymen covered their heads with hoods, baseball caps, newspapers, plastic bags. Or they simply hunched their shoulders, impervious to the rain, the fatigue, the roar and hiss of metal monsters rushing by a few feet away. The immigrants knew the freeway median was a reasonably safe limbo in some ways: no bandits, no Border Patrol, no rough terrain. Just put one foot in front of the other. Pray the cars stay in their lanes. Try not to think about the moment when you'll have to sprint across this cement deathscape hauling your wife, your kids, your worldly possessions. Maybe the moment can be postponed indefinitely. Maybe you can just keep walking north and the freeway median will take you where you want to go.