Date: 1817

"In our perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvas on which some unknown hand paints it."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1819

Some dreams "more strong, abiding figures draw / 'Upon the brain, and we assert 'I saw;'"

— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)

Date: 1819

In sleep the fancy may place "A powerful likeness of a form and face" on the organs

— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)

Date: 1868

"Thy lovely portraiture we find / Engraven on our heart."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1868

"So deeply engraven I find / Thy form on my desolate heart!"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: April 26 1870

"Between the threads fine fumes arise / And shape their pictures in the brain."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: 1911

"As for Mr. Woodhouse, whose most famous sentences hang like texts in frames on the four walls of our memories, he is, next to Don Quixote, perhaps the most perfect gentleman in fiction; and under outrageous provocation he remains so."

— Bradley, A.C. (1851-1935)

Date: 1992

"Even more important to David than the very natural worry that his wife and his son might grow fond of one another was the intoxicating feeling that he had a blank consciousness to work with, and it gave him great pleasure to knead this yielding clay with his artistic thumbs."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2005

"The van emerged into the scene; men emerged from it and the whole event emerged, like a photo emerging. I didn't even need to see it. I closed my eyes and let it all develop in my mind."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)