Date: 1791, 1794

"My daily employment is to think of you and weep, to pray for your happiness and deplore my own folly: my nights are scarce more happy, for if by chance I close my weary eyes, and hope some small forgetfulness of sorrow, some little time to pass in sweet oblivion, fancy, still waking, wafts me ho...

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1914

"nd I know that just as the voice of Jesus was not heard, and is not heard, save here and there; just as the voice of Tolstoy is not heard, save here and there; and others great and small are lost in the great echoless desert of indifferentism, having produced little perceptible effect, so my voi...

— de Cleyre, Voltairine (1866-1912)

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: 1963

"Delicious recollections / float like perfume through the memory."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 1999

"A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: June 19, 2000

"The words slid from my brain, and knotted in my stomach."

— Packer, ZZ (b. 1973)

Date: September 22, 2015

"This is not to say that "Tender Torrent" wasn't "fun" (it seems to be out of print today, the most enduring form of censorship); but for me, its greatest entertainment value lay in returning it to its owner, aware of the lewd visions that seethed beneath her sunny exterior. And really, that perc...

— Schillinger, Liesl

Date: June 5, 2016

"Professor Sunstein's talk turned out to be a success, and his wife was on board when he decided to give book-length treatment to the ideas rattling around in his brain."

— Rosman, Katherine

Date: September 18, 2016

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

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: September 18, 2016

"In the dark hours, when we're wandering in the wilderness of thought, sometimes we just need to feel that someone, even a digital someone with a prerecorded voice, is watching over us."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)