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Date: March 1843

"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

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Date: c. 1862

"After great pain, a formal feeling comes -- / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -- / The stiff Heart questions 'was it He, that bore,' / And 'Yesterday, or Centuries before'?"

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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Date: 1892

"Remorse is memory awake, / Her companies astir."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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Date: 1892

"Winds of summer fields / Recollect the way,-- / Instinct picking up the key / Dropped by memory."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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Date: 1911

"Sleep scatters you; sensations come storming along into the dreamer's mind, and he is a prey to each in turn."

— Lewis, Edwin Herbert (1866-1938)

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Date: 1922

"All night, through the eternity of night, / Pain was my portion though I could not feel. / Deep in my humbled heart you ground your heel, / Till I was reft of even my inner light, / Till reason from my mind had taken flight, / And all my world went whirling in a reel."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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Date: 1963

"Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and piroutted there, absently."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

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Date: 1968

"There is a little man who lives in one's head. The little man keeps a library."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

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Date: 1968

"We might thus consider expanding the population in one's head to include subordinate little men who superintend the execution of the 'elementary' behaviors involved in complex sequences like grasping a shoelace."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

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Date: 1968

"The shop foreman [in one's head] goes about supervising that activity in a way that is, in essence, a microcosm of supervising tying one's shoe. Indeed the shop foreman might be imagined to superintend a detail of wage slaves, whose functions include: searching inputs for traces of shoelace, fle...

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.