"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"It's easier to dismiss ghosts in the daylight."
— Patricia Briggs (Dragon Bones)

"Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us."
— Jim Carroll

""About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page.

"Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired.

He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff."

"It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write.

"Books are boring," James said as he wrote.

"They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.

He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books."

From A Certain Slant of Light"
— Laura Whitcomb

"'Oh, very good,' interrupted Snape, his lip curling. 'Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. 'Ghosts are transparent.'"
— J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"One IGHS member said that, yup, she could hear it, too. Then again, during a dinner conversation earlier in the trip, this same woman heard “Siegfried and Roy” as “Sigmund Freud.” The resulting image-Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men’s makeup-haunts me to this day."
— Mary Roach

"As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window - Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!" and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs."
— Susan Hill

"At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

""Ghosts are transparent""
— Harry Potter

"'Don't matter if you believe in them or not. If they're there, they're there,' Mrs. Phipps said."
— Joan Lowery Nixon (The Haunting)

"Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Ghosts must be all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea."
— Henrik Ibson

"I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Tyrants Destroyed and Other Short Stories)

"Do you wanna come with me? 'Cause if you do then I should warn you, you're gonna see all sorts of things. Ghosts from the past. Aliens from the future. The day the Earth died in a ball of flame. It won't be quiet, it won't be safe, and it won't be calm. But I'll tell you what it will be: The trip of a lifetime!"
— Doctor Who