Date: 1706

"My Heart is full of Sin; My Life is full of Sin; I am under the wrath of God for Sin; I am a Slave to Sin and Satan."

— Mather, Cotton (1663-1728)

Date: 1791, 1794

"I mean not to extenuate the faults of those unhappy women who fall victims to guilt and folly; but surely, when we reflect how many errors we are ourselves subject to, how many secret faults lie hid in the recesses of our hearts, which we should blush to have brought into open day (and yet those...

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1799

"My mind was so full of objects of more urgent moment that the propriety of taking them [his shoes] along with me never occurred."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"Others, unemployed, were strolling to and fro, and testified to their vacancy of thought and care by humming or whistling a tune."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"My mind gradually expanded itself, as it were, for the reception of new ideas."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"The image of Achsa filled my fancy, but it was the harbinger of nothing but humiliation and sorrow."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1845

"They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: October 10, 1869

"Recitations alone readily degenerate into dusty repetitions, and lectures alone are too often a useless expenditure of force. The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through."

— Eliot, Charles William (1834-1926)

Date: 1892

"The broadest land that grows / Is not so ample as the breast / These emerald seams enclose."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1922

"The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."

— Eliot, T. S. (1888-1965)