Date: 1820

"Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne / In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer, / And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane, / Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

Poetry "reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: September, 1956

Je veux saisir les choses avec l'esprit comme le pénis est saisi par le vagin. [I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina.]

— Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968)

Date: 1998

"Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and...

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"Rose Garmony woke at six-thirty, and even before her eyes were open the names of her three children were on her mind, on her mind's tongue: Leonora, John, Candy."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)