Date: 1741

"'I've a friend,' answers Mind, 'who, though slow, is yet sure, / And will rid me at last of your insolent power: / Will knock down your walls, the whole fabric demolish, / And at once your strong holds and my slavery abolish: / And while in your dust your dull ruins decay, / I'll snap off my cha...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1776

"I am provoked at this natural incapacity of conveying my sentiments to you; words are but a cloak, or rather a clog, to our ideas; there should be no curtain before the hearts of friends; and the longing I have ever felt for an intuitive converse, is to me a strong argument for a future state."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1788

"Emmeline would then have taken him; but she said no; and sitting down on the ground, held him in her lap, till Barret who had seen her from a window, came out and took him from her; to which, as to a thing usual, she consented, and then walked calmly home with Emmeline, who, extremely discompose...

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1790, 1794

"How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!"

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: December 1790

"But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed – and only metaphysical sophists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form; it is a work of abstraction – and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1797

"Thus on the golden thread that Fancy weaves / Buoyant, as Hope's illusive flattery breathes, / The young and visionary Poet leaves / Life's dull realities, while sevenfold wreaths / Of rainbow light around his head revolve."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1799

"[W]hat knowledge they [women] have gotten stands out as it were above the very surface of their minds, like the appliquée of the embroiderer, instead of having been interwoven with the growth of the piece, so as to have become a part of the stuff. They did not, like men, acquire what they...

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1860

"The stricken man lay for some time with his eyes fixed on the letter, as if he were trying to knit up his thoughts by its help."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1993

"I didn't need to speak, I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet."

— Campion, Jane (b. 1954)

Date: 2011

"His mind unwinding like a spool of loose thread."

— Nadzam, Bonnie