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: 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: 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)

Date: April 27, 2016

"But you don't have to have your leg in a bear trap every minute to seriously consider, during the latest entrapment, that maybe just cutting your legs off would be the way to go. In the case of BPD, the offending leg is called 'consciousness'."

— Mishell Baker (b. 2009)

Date: January, 2017

"They bleed -- if not from vaginas then from their sensitive souls."

— Kipnis, Laura (b. July 19, 1956)

Date: February 21, 2019

"I cared about the feeling that my thoughts were being dictated. I cared about the collective head, which seemed to be running a fever. But if we managed to escape, to break out of the great skull and into the fresh air, if Twitter was shut down for crimes against humanity, what would we be losing?"

— Lockwood, Patricia

Date: February 24, 2019

"If I watched long enough, I felt lightly hypnotized, as if one of those disembodied hands had reached in and massaged my brain."

— Matchar, Emily (b. 1982)

Date: February 24, 2019

"It was 2016 when I discovered Oddly Satisfying, and I needed a little brain massage."

— Matchar, Emily (b. 1982)