"There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury"
About this Quote
An injury doesn’t just hurt; it haunts. Alexander Smith’s line turns damage into a specter that refuses exorcism, insisting that the hardest “ghost” to lay isn’t supernatural at all but psychological: the memory of being wronged, diminished, or violated. The phrasing is quietly merciless. “No ghost so difficult” suggests there are plenty of phantoms in the human imagination, but this one is uniquely stubborn because it lives inside the self, where ordinary remedies don’t reach. You can change your address, your job, even your relationships; the injury travels light.
Smith was writing in a 19th-century literary culture steeped in Gothic imagery and moral introspection, where ghosts were less about jump scares than about conscience, grief, and unresolved accounts. He borrows that vocabulary to make a clean argument about time’s limits. The subtext: forgiveness is not a simple act of will, and “moving on” is often a performance demanded by polite society. The injury returns not because the victim is sentimental, but because the mind treats threat as information worth saving. Trauma is a survival skill that turns into a prison.
The sentence also contains a sly accusation. If an injury is a ghost, someone made it, and someone benefits from urging you to “lay” it quickly. Smith hints at the way social order pressures the wounded to tidy up their pain for everyone else’s comfort. What makes the line work is its refusal to romanticize suffering while still honoring its persistence: the haunting isn’t melodrama, it’s evidence.
Smith was writing in a 19th-century literary culture steeped in Gothic imagery and moral introspection, where ghosts were less about jump scares than about conscience, grief, and unresolved accounts. He borrows that vocabulary to make a clean argument about time’s limits. The subtext: forgiveness is not a simple act of will, and “moving on” is often a performance demanded by polite society. The injury returns not because the victim is sentimental, but because the mind treats threat as information worth saving. Trauma is a survival skill that turns into a prison.
The sentence also contains a sly accusation. If an injury is a ghost, someone made it, and someone benefits from urging you to “lay” it quickly. Smith hints at the way social order pressures the wounded to tidy up their pain for everyone else’s comfort. What makes the line work is its refusal to romanticize suffering while still honoring its persistence: the haunting isn’t melodrama, it’s evidence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Forgiveness |
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