Date: 1791, 1794

"[B]ut the poor girl by thoughtless passion led astray, who, in parting with her honour, has forfeited the esteem of the very man to whom she has sacrificed every thing dear and valuable in life, feels his indifference in the fruit of her own folly, and laments her want of power to recall his los...

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1793

"If, with the 'mind's eye,' she had a taste to travel through distant kingdoms and take a retrospective view of past events, she might nourish that fondness for variety so predominant with human nature, and in the indulgence of this disposition be happy."

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]

Date: 1892

"Remorse is cureless,—the disease / Not even God can heal; / For 't is his institution,-- / The complement of hell."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: 1966, 1968

"'You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,' Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inn...

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: Summer, 1991

"Elinor's pupils, those less tractable sphincters of the soul, won't close against the hapless hemorrhaging of her visual attention-flow toward Marianne; it is this, indeed, that renders her consciousness, in turn, habitable, inviting, and formative to readers as 'point-of-view.'"

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: 2002

"Of the friend watching him leave remembering / the story of her body / with his once and the stories of their children / made with other people and how his mind went on / pressing hers like a body."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 2006

"If our thoughts / and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste / of bile when we're defeated and be flavored / faintly with grace on better days?"

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2010

"One bore the Professorial stigmata, if only brainular, for years."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)