61
" In the kitchen Anna was quietly plotting to get rid of him. A brief talk, then she would contact the publisher and ask for someone more suitable. When she bore her best china cautiously back into the room she found him on his feet, examining things. 'Here we are,' she said, speaking drily, trying to call him back to his place.'Who's this guy?' Dick asked, staring at a happy, rounded man having his photograph taken on a boat with a huge fish at his feet.'That is my Uncle Max,' Anna said impatiently. 'Here is your coffee.''Great. I need a cup. Strong and black.' Dick was feeling his reckless self coming out: so what is she thinks I'm a scruff? Push some buttons and see what the old cow's made of.Anna regretted that he must place his stained body upon her newly-cleaned velvet. She was grateful for having no sense of smell.'Tell me what you have written, Mr Michaels?' He noticed the challenge.'All sorts of rubbish,' he said unhelpfully, wishing to add the word 'rubbish', but showing admirable restraint. 'I write anything that's required.' As he spoke he noticed an unrealised pride in his humble craft. 'I turn things into readable English so people will be interested. You see, not everyone who has had an interesting life knows how to make it sound good; that's my job.' He could see her expression soften. Something simian amid the fine features? 'I make a great effort not to change the original intention, of course...''You call that a ghost, I think?''Yeah. The ghost brings people's lives to life. "
62
" I glanced in the first open door and stopped short. Desks. Four tiny desks. A wall of faded posters of alphabet animals. A blackboard, still showing the ghost of numbers. I blinked, certain I was seeing wrong.
Derek nudged my legs, telling me to get moving. I looked at him, and I looked at the classroom.
This was where Derek had grown up. Four tiny desks. Four little boys. Four young werewolves.
For a second, I could see them—three boys working at the three clustered desks, Derek alone at the fourth, pushed slightly away, hunched over his work, trying to ignore the others.
Derek nudged me again, whining softly, and I looked down to see him eyeing the room, every hair on his neck on end, anxious to get away from this place. "
― Kelley Armstrong , The Reckoning (Darkest Powers, #3)
64
" Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self. "
― Steven Pinker , The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
71
" We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels. "
― Dorothy L. Sayers , The Mind of the Maker
72
" We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.
- A Fog in Santone (1898-1901) "
― O. Henry , Hikayeler
80
" I finally found my way to the Really Restricted Section, where they keep the kind of books most scholars aren't even supposed to know exist. I knocked on the closed door, said the proper passwords, and the door opened before me. I walked in, and the ghost of the Head Librarian, a thin, dusty presence, with dark eyes and a disapproving look, appeared before me, blocking my way. (He had been eaten by a book, then brought back by the other books, apparently because they approved of him. Because even though he didn't have much time for people, he loved books.) "
― Simon R. Green , The Bride Wore Black Leather (Nightside, #12)