Date: 1854

"For you remember how he stood here before you on this platform; you remember how, face to face and foot to foot, I pursued him through all his intricate windings; you remember how, he sneaked, and slunk, and sidled, and splitted of straws, until, with not an inch of ground to which to cling, I h...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1914

"A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1922

"In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1949

"And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."

— Orwell, George (1903-1950)

Date: 1984

"Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1996

"You would certainly feel stimulated, since one of your brain's main "brakes" would be disabled. But other brakes, such as GABA, would still be functioning and in the absence of any extra direct stimulants overall activity wouldn't kindle into the kind of neural conflagration that can occur with ...

— Braun, Stephen

Date: 2000

"Mad thoughts. Sparks from the wheel."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I glimpsed a molten core to consciousness, a protean heat where everything could be reshaped. Yes, a molten core, like the core of the earth, deeper than the deposits of civilisation, beyond the complacencies of archaeology."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2001

"I walked around this place, said Austerlitz, his left hand pointing to the tall brick façade of the hospital building towering behind the wall, in the curiously remote state of mind induced by the drugs I was being given; both desolate and weirdly contented I wandered, all through that winter, u...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2006

"That he could enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own."

— McCarthy, Cormac (b. 1933)