Date: 1791, 1794

"I will wear a smile on my face, though the thorn rankles in my heart."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1799

Certain beliefs cannot be "outrooted" from the mind

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"You see, though a man, I use your privilege, and prefer knitting yarn to threshing my brain with a book or the barn-floor with a flail"

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"Mischievous passions" may be too "deeply rooted" in the heart to tear out

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: March 1843

"My earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1963

"The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 2010

"Yet somehow, while he'd slept, the name had taken up residence in his head, as if he'd gone to sleep listening to a song played over and over, the lyrics digging a rut into his brain like a plow, and now part of his mind was still in that rut and couldn't get out."

— Cronin, Justin