A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso.

In exile one is nothing but a ghost ... I ceased to exist when I went into exile.

No, no, I am but shadow of myself:
You are deceived, my substance is not here;

There's only a shadow of me In a manner of speaking, I'm dead

What truly remains of me Is that very thing- my absence.

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.

I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;

It is a mistake to believe in my presence.. .If I take a seat at a party, I can see, even from afar, that only a ghost is sitting there.

I only appear to be dead.

She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and ere-long, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody.