Exorcism Quotes

“Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself as well as from others than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture”
― M. Scott Peck, M.D.

“I gave examples from my clinical practice of how love was not wholly a thought or feeling. I told of how that very evening there would be some man sitting at a bar in the local village, crying into his beer and sputtering to the bartender how much he loved his wife and children while at the same time he was wasting his family's money and depriving them of his attention. We recounted how this man was thinking love and feeling love--were they not real tears in his eyes?--but he was not in truth behaving with love.”
― M. Scott Peck, M.D.

“Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.”
― Octavio Paz

“You shouldn't believe all the press about Ouija boards. They can't be used in an exorcism. Trivial Pursuit can, but that's another story.”
― Seanan McGuire, Magic for Nothing

“Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

“The exorcist had a slightly Australian tinge to his voice, and the laid-back, whatever-comes-next attitude of a man who had suddenly realised two degrees short of a sunstroke that exorcism was the perfect career choice he'd never been offered in school.”
― Kate Griffin, A Madness of Angels

“Only after you've done the exorcism, then
you'll understand that ghost's also a species.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Everyone knows that even the best exorcism has to be renewed once in a while.”
― Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself

“Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery, for this unorthodox process would only prove to be the cerebral equivalent of tracking a creature one was not even sure existed: surely one could happen upon some new species deep in the caverns somewhere and assume it to be the goal of one’s trek, but then there was a certain idiocy to this notion, as one would never be sure this newfound entity should prove to be what one wished it to be; taken further, this very need to find something, to begin with, would only lead one to clamber more deeply inward along rigorous paths and over unsteady terrain, the entirety of which could only be traversed with the arrogant resolve of someone who has already determined, with a misplaced sense of pride in his own assumptions, that he was undoubtedly making headway in a direction worthwhile. And assuming still that this process was the only viable option available, and further assuming that Morell could manage to find a way to track down the beast lingering ostensibly inside of Princess Cookie, what was he then to do with it? Exorcise the thing? Reason with it? Negotiate maybe? How? Could one hope to impose terms and conditions upon the behavior of something tracked and captured in the wilds of the intellect? The thought was a bizarre one and the prospect of achieving success with it unlikely. Perhaps, it would be enough to track the beast, but also to let it live according to its own inclinations inside of her. This would seem a more agreeable proposition.

Unfortunately, however, the possibility still remained that there was no beast at all, but that the aberration plaguing her consciousness was merely a side effect of some divine, yet misunderstood purpose with which she had been imbued by the Almighty Lord Himself. She could very well have been functioning on a spiritual plane far beyond Morell’s ability to grasp, which, of course, seared any scrutiny leveled against her with the indelible brand of blasphemy. To say the least, the fear of Godly reprisal which this brand was sure to summon up only served to make the prospect of engaging in such measures as invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery seem both risky and wasteful. And thus, it was a nonstarter.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“Back down is an effective way to cast out strife spirit.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“How is true possession to be distinguished from fraud or the symptoms of disease? The Church prescribes four tests - the language test, the test of preternatural physical strength, the test of levitation and the test of clairvoyance and prevision. If a person can on occasion understand, or better still, speak a language, of which, in his normal state, he is completely ignorant; if he can manifest the physical miracle of levitation or perform unaccountable feats of strength, and if he can correctly predict the future or describe events taking place at a distance - then that person may be presumed to be possessed by devils. (Alternatively, he may be presumed to be the recipient of extraordinary graces; for in many instances divine and infernal miracles are, most unhappily, identical. The levitation of saintly ecstatic is distinguishable from the levitation of ecstatics demoniacs only in virtue of the moral antecedents and consequences of the event. These moral antecedents and consequences are often hard to assess, and it has sometimes happened that even the holiest persons have been suspected of producing their ESP phenomena and their PK effects by diabolic means.)”
― Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun

“Go not to bed leaving bread and milk behind
On the table: these summon the dead.
But He, the exorcist, mingles
Under the mildness of our eyelids

Their spectres amongst all else that we see;
And the spells from fumitory of earth smoke and of rue
Are as explicit to Him as the clearest logical connection.

Nothing can derange for Him the truly formed image,
Be it of graves, be it of rooms,
Singing of rings, of spangles, of urns.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“... a demon cannot be doped.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

“There was nothing so harrowing as that fiendish sadistic laugh revealing the entity taking gluttonous delight in causing him excruciating pain and fear.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

“The Darkness was going to take quite some getting used to, if ever.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

“Bless me' quoth I (crossing myself) 'what spectacle have we here?' 'This' (said the good Father who was to do the Feat) 'is a man that's possest with an Evil Spirit.' 'That's a damn'd lye' (with respect of the Company, cryed the Devil that tormented him) 'for this is not a man possest with a Devil, but a Devil possest with a man. ... You are to understand that we Devils never enter into the body of a Catchpole, but by force, and inspight of our hearts; and therefore to speak properly, you are to say, this is a Devil Catchpol'd, and not a Catchpole bedevil'd.”
― Roger L'Estrange, The visions of dom Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, knight of the Order of St. James made English by R.L.

“If I had known that meeting you once more
Could lay the ghost so suddenly
Of all my dreams of you;
If I had known that exorcism
Would come with your first work to me
After all these years of anguished longing and delay,
I should have crossed the world
To find you and the peace at last
Of freedom from my love for you.”
― Mariella Gable, Blind Man's Stick

“A great boob he is to pit himself against a holy Father and a bishop of the Church, with the very House of God next door. The nerve of him!”
― Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan

“Es matemático: donde decae la religión, crece la superstición.”
― Gabrielle Amorth

“Exorcism, a reaction in force, with a battering ram, is the true poem of the prisoner.

In the very space of suffering and obsession, you introduce such exaltation, such magnificent violence, welded to the
hammering of words, that the evil is progressively dissolved, replaced by an airy demonic sphere—a marvelous state!”
― Henri Michaux

“Omnes dii gentium daemonia sunt; Dominus autem coelos fecit. Deliver us, O Lord, from religiosity and Godlessness alike, lest we wander in fakery or die of boredom. Restore to us Thyself as Giver and the secular as Thy gift. Let idols perish and con jobs cease. Give repentance and better minds to all pagans and secularists; in the meantime, of Thy mercy, keep them out of our cellars.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

“Let blessings only dwell here, yes, / not one phantasm of the past, / for now begins the exorcism / evicting darkness at long last.

(from Renovation of a Soul)”
― Robert J. Tiess, The Humbling and Other Poems

“The grounds at St. Andrew's were packed with limousines and hundreds of milling guests, dressed in the pastel shades of Easter. I looked absurdly out of place in my black blouse and skirt, but many of the guests were my former clients to whom my severity seemed perfectly natural. My impulse was to flee and head to a bar, the seedier the better, to wipe out this nauseating show of renewal and fine millinery. But before I could make my move, Kenneth, ever vigilant, spotted me through the crowd.”
― Sandi Tan, The Black Isle

“The devil knows who's working to defeat him, and he will attack those who attack him.”
― Fr. Vincent Lampert

“A very interesting paradox seen in individuals possessed by demons is that they are incredibly bright when analyzing others beyond appearances, but incredibly stupid when not noticing the obvious in front of their nose.”
― Dan Desmarques

“Jeremy, I’ll say this once,’ he (Jonathan) began, ‘I’m not going to be drawn into any silly squabble you want to invent. I am not going to defend my recent behaviour in the village or anywhere else. I am not going to tell you my plans, I have had reasons for everything I’ve done and a great deal of thinking has gone into my recent very painful decisions…”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“Stop it!’ The girl jumped out of her chair, ‘Stop torturing me! Stop pretending you didn’t know each other, you planned all this, and then you waited for a wet day and then he was going to come in and then there is this story, and then he’d send the photos off, stop it! Leave me alone!’ She rushed to the door and tore it open and vanished down the hotel stairs.”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“…the painting was now all finished, she would leave the masking tape on till it dried. It was satisfying to do this. A job with a beginning, middle and end, and people to have dinner with. Don’t think about it, keep busy. Got no money anyway.”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“Was there something … something evil …getting at Hugo? This bizarre and unwelcome thought surfaced in his mind. Were demons and evil spirits only to be found in the bible stories, or maybe this was some sort of challenge to him to deal with without help from anyone, least of all from the One who he constantly questioned and tried to understand …”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“But when his accusers rose to speak they brought none of the charges I was expecting; they merely had several points of disagreement with him about their peculiar religion and about someone called Jesus, a dead man whom Paul alleged to be alive … Jonathan read on, fascinated by the story, there were so many interesting details. But then he paused – was it the true story it said it was?”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness