"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
"I've been walking [San Francisco] for three decades... and now the place is layered with ghosts — of my own life, of the events of my lifetime, and of the histories that unfolded there before. Everything used to be something else."
-Rebecca Solnit, "San Francisco: The Metamorphosis"
I am a person who cannot give up the ghosts. Everywhere I go reminds me of the last time ...
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