Date: 1782

"He must, upon no account, sustain a conversation with any spirit, lest he should appear, to his utter disgrace, interested in what is said: and when he is quite tired of his existence, from a total vacuity of ideas, he must affect a look of absence, and pretend, on the sudden, to be wholly lost ...

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"In the midst of this jargon, to which the fulness of Cecilia's mind hardly permitted her to listen, there suddenly appeared at the door of the apartment, Mr. Albany, who, with his usual austerity of countenance, stopt to look round upon the company."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"But I'll make him believe that it's necessary, in order to give him something to think of, for really his poor head is so vacant, that I am sure if one might but play upon it with sticks, it would sound just like a drum."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"Oh if wholly unchecked were the happiness I now have in view, if no foul storm sometimes lowered over the prospect, and for a moment obscured its brightness, how could my heart find room for joy so superlative? The whole world might rise against me as the first man in it who had nothing left to ...

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"Left now to herself, sensations unfelt before filled the heart of Cecilia."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"Not all her attempted philosophy had calmed her mind like this plan; in merely refusing indulgence to grief, she had only locked it up in her heart, where eternally struggling for vent, she was almost overpowered by restraining it."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"She was now indeed more unhappy than even in the period of her forgetfulness, yet her mind was no longer filled with the restless turbulence of hope, which still more than despondency unfitted it for thinking of others."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"She determined, as much as was in her power, in quitting her desultory dwellings, to empty her mind of the transactions which had passed in them, and upon entering a house where she was permanently to reside, to make the expulsion of her past sorrows, the basis upon which to establish her future...

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1784

"Blest is yon shepherd, on the turf reclin'd, / Who on the varied clouds which float above / Lies idly gazing--while his vacant mind / Pours out some tale antique of rural love!"

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1785

"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)