Date: 1791, 1794

"Such were the dreadful images that haunted her distracted mind, and nature was sinking fast under the dreadful malady which medicine had no power to remove."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1799

"Hitherto distress had been contemplated at a distance, and through the medium of fancy delighting to be startled by the wonderful, or transported by sublimity."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

One's thoughts may be visible to another

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1850

"My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1963

"Words dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1980

"And here we find our greatest affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement."

— Robinson, Marilynne (b. 1943)

Date: 1984

"Small and far away on the mind's screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood,"

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1997

"She occupies now an entirely new angular relation to Mercy, to those refusals, among the Living, to act on behalf of Death or its ev'ryday Coercions,--Wages too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death's thousand Metaphors in the World,--as if, the instant of h...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)