Date: 1845

"I then presented an appearance enough to affect any but a heart of iron."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1850

"The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1854

"They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1890

"I've known her from an ample nation / Choose one; / Then close the valves of her attention / Like stone."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1892

"Least village boasts its blacksmith, / Whose anvil's even din / Stands symbol for the finer forge / That soundless tugs within, // Refining these impatient ores / With hammer and with blaze, / Until the designated light / Repudiate the forge."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1922

"When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected...

— Eliot, T. S. (1888-1965)

Date: 1922

"Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears, / Transforming me into a shape of flame. / I will come out, back to your world of tears, / A stronger soul within a finer frame."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1922

"I do not fear to face the fact and say, / How darkly-dull my living hours have grown, / My wounded heart sinks heavier than stone, / Because I loved you longer than a day!"

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1984

"The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1992

"Their souls are crumbling like a dirt clod, hold."

— Pavement