Date: 1890

"The soul selects her own society, / Then shuts the door; / On her divine majority / Obtrude no more."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"So, safer, guess, with just my soul / Upon the window-pane / Where other creatures put their eyes, / Incautious of the sun."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"A deed knocks first at thought, / And then it knocks at will."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"It then goes out an act, / Or is entombed so still / That only to the ear of God / Its doom is audible."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"The body grows outside,-- / The more convenient way,-- / That if the spirit like to hide, / Its temple stands alway // Ajar, secure, inviting."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"One need not be a chamber to be haunted, / One need not be a house; / The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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: w. c. 1871, 1896

"Remembrance has a Rear and Front -- / 'Tis something like a House / It has a Garret also / For Refuse and the Mouse.."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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: 2000

"After // my girls are in bed or while / they play in the sandbox and / my husband gardens, I rush / down the winding stairs of / relative mental health where / we live, where I talk, deny, / or compose poems."

— Sagaser, Elizabeth Harris