Date: 1937

"Make [her mind], as a garden gay, / Every bud of thought display, / Till, improving year by year, / The whole culture shall appear,"

— Philips, Ambrose (1674-1749)

Date: 1959

"(A slight miracle might cleanse / His brain / Of all attachments, claw-roots of sense)"

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

Date: 1992

"Other people's words drifted through his mind, like the tumbleweed across a windy desert in the opening shots of 'They Came from Outer Space.'"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"That terror was the price he had to pay for the first heartbreaking wave of pleasure when consciousness seemed to burst out, like white blossoms, along the branches of every nerve."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Other people's words drifted through his mind. Tumbleweed riding through a desert. Had he already thought that?"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"As he allowed the old order to be dismembered, a new erotic order arose in which there was an unceasing intercourse between sensation and conception, the mental blossoming of every sensation and the embodiment of every idea."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider's web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)