Date: December 1790

"Go hence, thou slave of impulse, look into the private recesses of thy heart, and take not a mote from thy brother’s eye, till thou hast removed the beam from thine own."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Taught from infancy that beauty is a woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"There are, it is true, trials when the good man must appeal to God from the injustice of man; and amidst the whining candour of hissings of envy, erect a pavilion in his own mind to retire to till the rumour be overpast."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"The human mind is built of nobler materials than to be easily corrupted."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"False, indeed, must be the light when the drapery of situation hides the man, and makes him stalk in masquerade, dragging from one scene of dissipation to another the nerveless limbs that hang with stupid listlessness, and rolling round the vacant eye, which plainly tells us that there is no min...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1795 (w. 1787)

"Words may flatter you, but the countenance never can deceive you; the eyes are the windows of the soul, and through them you are to watch what passes in the inmost recesses of the heart."

— Edgeworth, Maria

Date: 1893

A woman's nature "is like a great house full of rooms ... and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."

— Wharton, Edith (1862-1937)

Date: 1966, 1968

"Otherwise they [the people we used to be] turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 2010

"The Professor was my very own bespoke monstre sacrée for so long--so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth--that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial shtick: a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol asp...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)