Exorcism Quotes

It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification.

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother

I was a scared kid... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.

This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known.

Exorcism is a subject that interests me, and books on shamanism, I've read through.

One of the things people don't know about exorcism, is that you can't really use exorcism on things that are older than Christianity.

To me, the scariest movie ever made to this day is The Exorcist. It still scares the living hell out of me, and it’s because of the fantasy element. It’s the exorcism. It’s the Devil. It’s not a guy breaking into your house trying to torture you or cut your whatever off. Those kinds of movies don’t do it for me, and I don’t call them horror.

If love is like a possession, maybe my letters are like my exorcisms.

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

I think music should be scary. Music is an exorcism.

Possession and exorcism is something that’s in every religion and every culture. It’s a real primal fear: Is the body a vessel for our spirits? What happens if something else takes over it? Where does the spirit go?

Be a witness, as I excersize my exorcism

Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or another, working through my feelings at the time.

You don't blame us for being here, do you? After all, we have no place to go. No home... Incidentally, what an excellent day for an exorcism.

And as the hour approached for the execution, in his own mind, Collins became both the executioner and the victim. He would pace up and down, transformed in almost a kind of exorcism when he knew he was responsible for taking someone's life.

That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this "entity," as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit.

In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal.

or The Last Exorcism, I researched a lot of real exorcisms. I watched videos of exorcisms, I listened to tapes, and I read actual accounts of priests' logs. I also looked at a lot of the physicality. I would look into fits of hysteria and look at energies of people in manic, hysteric fits.

I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.

Performing an exorcism was like changing your oil. It's a drag, but necessary.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

The music is so euphoric,as a way of battling the words. It’s like an exorcism, beating it out with drums, shake this demon out, it’s so visceral because the melancholy has to be drummed out. I can’t let it sit inside me.

He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.

I was just reviewed by Robert Gottlieb, who was my editor at 'The New Yorker,' and he sort of wondered at the fact that I still need to exorcise my parents at my age. I think he makes a basic mistake in thinking that exorcism can ever be total. The exorcism of your parents will still be occurring on your own deathbed.

Not to waste time on nonsense. Not to be taken in by conjurors and hoodoo artists with their talk about incantations and exorcism and all the rest of it. Not to be obsessed with quail-fighting or other crazes like that.

It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

Danced healing rituals (in African village compounds, temple courtyards, dance-therapy studios, public theaters, and other social settings) reinvoke old traumas for exorcism and the transformation of fear, convince people that evil is gone or possible to dissipate, and reaffirm communal solidarity and a sense of well-being.

In school, I was always being cast as the clown. And then I did The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), and once people hear you scream, they can't un-hear it. But I don't mean to say that I've been typecast, either.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.

I had a lot of time to think, and that is not good for your mind. And when it actually happened, it was not so much a celebration but the relief. It was an exorcism anxiety. After each race there is a procedure in which you get taken off to the podium and the TV interviews.

Moshe Sluhovsky's fascinating study links spirit possession, exorcism, and mystical practice in early modern Europe. Women and men, healers and priestly exorcisers are caught up in a new quest for truth and introspection as they try to figure out whether these dramas of body and soul come from the devil or God. A stunning feat of scholarship and interpretation.

When jobs come up, like a low-budget film like The Last Exorcism, you say yes and you see where it takes you.

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

What I notice, as a historian reading stories about so-called nature miracles, the walking on the water, or the miraculous catch of fishes, they're done especially for the insiders, for the disciples. Usually healings and exorcisms are done for people along the road, as it were. Jesus doesn't come on the water to save the fishing fleet from Capernaum, he comes on the water to save the disciples. It's a parable, dummy, it's a parable, don't you get it? If the leadership of the church takes off in a boat without Jesus, it will sink, it will get nowhere.

The ritual of exorcism is not practiced by an ordinary priest. An exorcist requires specific training and must be thought to have a personal sanctity. He can be exposed to dangerous behavior and personal threat. His prayers often cause a violent response as he attempts to shine a beam of light into the darkness.

The fact is that a "minor exorcism" takes place in every Baptism and Confirmation ceremony when we renounce Satan and all his works and empty promises. This prayer service will be along those lines. I'm not saying that anyone involved in the redefinition of marriage is possessed by the devil, which, if that were the case, would require the remedy of a "Major Exorcism," but all of us are certainly subject to the devil's evil influences and in need of protection and deliverance from evil.

Of course, certain religious expressions are fine. If a tribe of Aqualishes wants to boil rhino horns in frog saliva on the National Mall to honor their deity, we'd have a commemorative postage stamp ready by next December. But let a Christian mention the baby Jesus to a kindergarten class and the ACLU wants an exorcism.

Humans have will. In an exorcism with a human, you are dealing with the human will, and whether that will is sufficiently resolved in terms of what allowed it to be manipulated. The will must have done something to surrender to the presence of the demon. You have to resurrect the moral authority of the person's will.

There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism.

In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.

Just in case, though, I stormed into my apartment, tossed a quick hello to Mr. Wong, then rummaged through my entertainment center to lay out all my exorcism equipment. I kept it in my entertainment center because exorcisms were nothing if not entertaining.

I dislike The Exorcist, and I found it a warning sign of the dangers in a furious cinematic talent putting the audience through it (a Hitchcock phrase) without purpose, or without the nagging moral anxiety that activated Hitch. You see, I don't think William Friedkin believes in the Devil, or cares about him. I think he found exorcism a pretext for a gross-out and he calculated there was an audience for it, or a crowd ready to be challenged. Maybe I'm too much of an atheist to stand religion being so thrashed.

I've always wanted to be involved in an exorcism movie. But I thought, "How do you make something scarier than The Exorcist?" The answer is you don't. But that doesn't mean you can't make something that is original and interesting.

Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century, the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms . . . movie stars to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!

I was haunted by a bear attack that happened in Algonquin Park in 1991. The problem was that I dont believe in ghosts, so that ruled out an exorcism. My other choice was to start writing.

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.