A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
“A person who is doing literary writing must deal in emotion-charged symbols – and so you end up writing about things like death and lions and sacramental meals, perhaps because those are emotional things that wake certain feelings in the deep spring of the individual. I’m using it as I have to, to engage and stir the reader’s emotions. And if fiction doesn’t do that, then it’s failed. That’s the purpose of fiction.”
Gene Wolfe