Date: October 1784

"She grows up, and of course mixes with those who are less interested: strangers will be sincere; she encounters the tongue of the flatterer, he will exaggerate, she finds herself possessed of accomplishments which have been studiously concealed from her, she throws the reins upon the neck of fan...

— Murray, Judith Sargent (1751-1820)

Date: 1914

"I think with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for all his sweetness, he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul."

— de Cleyre, Voltairine (1866-1912)

Date: December 13, 2010

"Like butterflies with frayed wings, thoughts fly at me in random and rapid succession."

— Oates, Joyce Carol (b. 1938)

Date: April 26, 2016

"It is by this dimension of imaginative relativity that Hogwarts, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Dickens's London, Hemingway's Paris, Didion's anxious California and the mind of Helen Oyeyemi, reclining like a sphinx between her pages in quiet and glittering sleep, all fit inside my tiny apartment, and ...

— Brennan, Summer

Date: September 18, 2016

"Deep in the night, those warnings scuttle around my mind like rats."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: September 18, 2016

"In the red glare of the digital clock, my brain rattled its cage."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: February 21, 2019

"The brief and hilarious reign of the atheists ('We are all atheists where Odin is concerned!') was over and we were back to being respectful of all religions, except Scientology, which posited that there were viral clams in the mind."

— Lockwood, Patricia

Date: February 21, 2019

"The defences we had developed against the oppressor could only be discussed in the secret room, among others of our kind, as we poured fountains of a wine that was like our shared blood and held out our hearts that were like scraped sparrows."

— Lockwood, Patricia

Date: February 21, 2019

"That the shorthand we developed to describe something could slowly, brightly, wiggle into an example of what it described: 'brain worms', until the whole phenomenon contracted to a single grey inch."

— Lockwood, Patricia