Date: 1820
"Yet am I king over myself, and rule / The torturing and conflicting throngs within, / As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1850
"No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1854
"t was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom."
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1992
"His thoughts, anticipating themselves hopelessly, stuttered in the starting blocks, and brought his feeling of fluency dangerously close to silence."
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)
Date: 2000
"I dread the prospect of the pressure of death roaming through my psyche like a wildcat prospector and producing these eruptions of unwelcome insight."
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)