Date: 1817, 1818

"My mind became the book through which I grew / Wise in all human wisdom, and its cave, / Which like a mine I rifled through and through, / To me the keeping of its secrets gave"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1817, 1818

"With ever-changing notes it floats along, / Till on my passive soul there seemed to creep / A melody, like waves on wrinkled sands that leap"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1817

"Not until my dream became / Like a child's legend on the tideless sand. / Which the first foam erases half, and half / Leaves legible"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned / In an ocean of dreams without a sound; / Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress / The light sand which paves it, consciousness"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1824

"'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand / 'Where the first wave had more than half erased / The track of deer on desert Labrador; / Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed, / 'Leaves his stamp visibly u...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1998

"Anxieties about work transmuted into the baser metal of simple night fear: illness and death, abstractions that soon found their focus in the sensation he still felt in his left hand."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)