Date: 1706

"My Heart is full of Sin; My Life is full of Sin; I am under the wrath of God for Sin; I am a Slave to Sin and Satan."

— Mather, Cotton (1663-1728)

Date: 1845

"They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: October 10, 1869

"Recitations alone readily degenerate into dusty repetitions, and lectures alone are too often a useless expenditure of force. The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through."

— Eliot, Charles William (1834-1926)

Date: 1922

"The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."

— Eliot, T. S. (1888-1965)

Date: 1984

"It is never entirely true that you don’t give a shit what others say about you, but you must throw it out of your mind."

— Baldwin, James (1924-1987)

Date: 1999

"Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects, or even carefully indexed in a filing cabinet."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: February 20, 2000

"I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo."

— Ebert, Roger (1942-2013)

Date: 2001

"The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time, and this is true from hour to hour as well as from era to era."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2001

"If I looked at this pitted and pocked wall microscopically enough the visual data would fill my brain entirely."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: August 3, 2009

"Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don't want to wake up the person who's in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple's smooth machine and click it on."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)