Date: February 2, 1796

"Her head's like the island, folks tell on, / Which nothing but monkies can dwell on"

— Hoare, Prince (1755-1834)

Date: 1814, 1816, 1896

One may try "Conjecture's trackless region round, / To judge what phantasms Fancy might have found-- / What Game the glances of her Hawks might trace, / Or Greyhounds view in visionary chace"

— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)

Date: 1850

"The relation discovered, must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind."

— Smith, Sydney (1771-1845)

Date: 1952

De la partie la plus noire de mon âme, à travers la zone hachurée me monte ce désir d'être tout à coup blanc [Out of the blackest part of my soul, through the zone of hachures, surges up this desire to be suddenly white].

— Fanon, Frantz (1925-1961)

Date: 1992

"Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. . There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping a...

— 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)

Date: December 30, 2015

"The brain was gently pulsating within. It resembled a small animal in a grotto. Or the meat of an open mussel."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)