Date: 1792

"The imagination of a painter, really great in his profession, is a magazine abounding with all the elegant forms, and striking effects, which are to be found in nature."

— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)

Date: 1814, 1816, 1896

"Thoughts, like Churl's corn, in chamber'd stores entomb'd, / Devour'd by vermin, or, decay, consum'd; / Whose fruits might food, or opulence, afford; / Enrich the Rich, or bless the poor Man's board."

— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)

Date: 1887

"It is a mistake to think that that little room [the 'brain-attic'] has elastic walls and can distend to any extent"

— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

Date: 1972

"My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare; / I had to cram so many things to store everything in there."

— Bowie, David [David Robert Jones] (1947-2016)

Date: February 20, 2000

"I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo."

— Ebert, Roger (1942-2013)

Date: 2001

"The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time, and this is true from hour to hour as well as from era to era."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2011

"Clean out my heart, you know? It's like a crowded old garage. It needs emptying and sorting."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: 2014

"You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: December 30, 2015

"All those rooms were gathered in my own brain, which looked exactly like Hasanaj’s, a wet, gleaming, walnutlike lump, composed of 100 billion brain cells so tiny and so myriad they could only be compared to the stars of a galaxy."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: February 18, 2017

"So we're stuck in Trump's head with him. ... It's a very cluttered place to be, a fine-tuned machine spewing a torrent of chaos, cruelty, confusion, farce and transfixing craziness."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)