He used to call vampires "the breathing ghosts"- for,....

“ He used to call vampires "the breathing ghosts"- for, as he put it, we existed in a kind of limbo-land between the living and the dead. We breathed, but we were not alive. We flitted through the air, but we still left foot prints on the ground. We were, and are, neither one nor the other, but something else entirely. ”

Eleanor Keane

From : The Breathing Ghosts