- Lucille Sharpe: But the horror... The horror was for love. The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all.
- Lucille Sharpe: [Looking at the dead butterflies] They're dying. They take the heat from the sun, and when it deserts them, they die.
- Edith Cushing: How sad.
- Lucille Sharpe: No, it's not sad, Edith. It's nature. It's a world of everything dying and eating each other right beneath our feet.
- Edith Cushing: Surely there's more to it than that.
- Lucille Sharpe: [Looking at Edith] Beautiful things are fragile... At home we have only black moths. Formidable creatures, to be sure, but they lack beauty. They thrive on the dark and cold.
- Edith Cushing: What do they feed on?
- Lucille Sharpe: Butterflies, I'm afraid.
- Edith Cushing: You're monsters. Both of you!
- Lucille Sharpe: Funny. That's the last thing Mother said, too.
- Thomas Sharpe: There is nothing to hold us in America.
- Edith Cushing: I see.
- Thomas Sharpe: Your novel. I read the new chapters and having delivered it in the morning. Will you still like to know my thoughts?
- Edith Cushing: If we must.
- Thomas Sharpe: It's absurdly sentimental. The aches that you describe with such earnestness, the pain, the loss. You clearly have not lived it at all. In fact, you only seem to know what other writers tell.
- Edith Cushing: That's enough!
- Thomas Sharpe: You insist on describing the torments of love when you clearly know NOTHING about them. I'M NOT DONE YET! What do you dream of? A kind man? A pure soul to be redeemed? Perfection? Perfection has no place in love, Edith. I advise you to return to your ghosts and fancies, the sooner the better. You know precious little about the human heart or love or the pain that comes with. You are nothing but a SPOILED CHILD!
- Edith Cushing: You lied to me!
- Thomas Sharpe: I did.
- Edith Cushing: You poisoned me!
- Thomas Sharpe: I did.
- Edith Cushing: You said you loved me!
- Thomas Sharpe: I do.
- Thomas Sharpe: [From trailer] A house as old as this one becomes, in time, a living thing. It starts holding onto things... keeping them alive when they shouldn't be. Some of them are good; some of them bad... Some should never be spoken about again.
- Thomas Sharpe: I cannot leave you here. In fact, I find myself thinking about you even at the most inopportune moments of the day. I feel as if a link exists between your heart and mine, and should that link be broken, either by distance or by time, then my heart would cease to beat and I would die.
- Lucille Sharpe: She knows everything. She stopped drinking her tea, but I poisoned the porridge.
- Thomas Sharpe: Lucille, stop it! Do we have to do this? Must we?
- Lucille Sharpe: Yes.
- Society Girl: It seems he's a baronet.
- Society Girl: What's a baronet?
- Society Girl: Well, an aristocrat of some sort.
- Edith Cushing: A man that feeds off land that others work for him. A parasite with a title.
- Society Girl: This parasite is perfectly charming and a magnificent dancer. Although, that wouldn't concern you, would it, Edith, our very young Jane Austen?
- Thomas Sharpe: [about to dance] I've always closed my eyes to things that made me uncomfortable. It makes everything easier.
- Edith Cushing: I don't want to close my eyes. I want to keep them open.
- Lucille Sharpe: You will stay here, with us... won't you? Wait for the storm to pass.
- Dr. Alan McMichael: If you insist.
- [first lines]
- Edith Cushing: [narrating] Ghosts are real. This much I know. The first time I saw one I was 10 years old. It was my mother's. Black cholera had taken her. So Father ordered a closed casket, asked me not to look. There were to be no parting kisses. No goodbyes. No last words. That is, until the night she came back.
- [last lines]
- Edith Cushing: [narrating] Ghosts are real. This much, I know.
- Man: [in the distance] Lady Sharpe! Lady Sharpe!
- Edith Cushing: There are things that tie them to a place, very much like they do us. Some remain tethered to a patch of land. A time and date. The spilling of blood. A terrible crime. But there are others. Others that hold onto an emotion. A drive. Loss. Revenge. Or love. Those, they never go away.
- Edith Cushing: [about portrait of Lady Sharpe] She looks quite...
- Lucille Sharpe: Horrible?
- Lucille Sharpe: Yes.
- Lucille Sharpe: It's an excellent likeness.
- Ogilvie: A ghost story. Your father didn't tell me it was a ghost story.
- Edith Cushing: Oh it's... it's not. It's more a story with a ghost in it. The ghost is just a metaphor.
- Ogilvie: A metaphor?
- Edith Cushing: For the past.
- Edith Cushing: [entering his mansion] Goodness. How many rooms are there?
- Thomas Sharpe: I don't know. Would you like to count them?