Date: 1791, 1794

"The name, like a sudden spark of electric fire, seemed for a moment to suspend his faculties--for a moment he was transfixed; but recovering, he caught Belcour's hand, and cried--'Stop! stop! I beseech you, name not the lovely Julia and the wretched Montraville in the same breath."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1799

"His emotion seemed to communicate itself, with an electrical rapidity, to my heart."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: w. 1796, 1799

"My soul was held up by the power of God, as the needle by the loadstone, and I did by faith, with joy draw water out of these wells of salvation."

— Osborn, Sarah (1714-1796)

Date: 1800

Thoughts may be kept in "perpetual motion"

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"A sort of electrical sympathy pervaded my companion, and terror and anguish were strongly manifested in the glances which she sometimes stole at me."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1820

"And they [Stewart, Tracy, Cabanis] ask why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure, as that of magnetism is to the needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: August 31, 1837

"But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1997

"Mason had more than once caught the old Astronomer watching Susannah with a focus'd Patience he recogniz'd from the Sector Room...as if waiting for a sudden shift in the sky of Passion, like that headlong change in Star Position that had led him to the discovery of the Aberration of Light,-- wai...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"But her innocent attention has reach'd unto the dead Vacuum ever at the bottom of my soul,-- humiliation absolute."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2001

"The spirals around the galactic core, the coin of hair over the drain, the mind looking down into itself--each formed by a hole it just barely avoids falling into."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)