Date: 1798

"When once this generous desire of affection and esteem is raised in the mind, their exertions seem to be universal, and spontaneous: children are then no longer like machines, which require to be wound up regularly to perform certain revolutions; they are animated with a living principle, which ...

— Edgeworth, Maria

Date: 1800,1806

"Thrice he rose, and thrice / His feet recoil'd; and still the livid flame / Lengthen'd and quiver'd as the moaning wind / Pass'd thro' the rushy crevice, while his heart / Beat, like the death-watch, in his shudd'ring breast."

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1860

"As for Tom's school course, it went on with mill-like monotony, his mind continuing to move with a slow, half-stifled pulse in a medium of uninteresting or unintelligible ideas."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire, Mr Tulliver retained the feeling towards his 'little wench' which made her presence a need to him though it would not suffice to cheer him. She was still the desire of his eyes, but the sweet spring of fatherly love was now mi...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1889

"Her mind became like a machine out of work—rusty, creaking, difficult to set going."

— Mary Cholmondeley (1859-1925)

Date: 1890

"The brain within its groove / Runs evenly and true."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: December 28, 1932

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery--always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud."

— Woolf, Virgina (1882-1941)

Date: 1986

"But it was only the heart's / racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want // until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke / of my body by the last margin of land where the river // mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens, / a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as // bar...

— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)

Date: November 8, 1994

"I thought this is some terrific computer down here."

— Blakeslee, Sandra