Date: 1845

"Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: January, 1884

"But as the distribution of brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the aurora borealis or the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that the brain's faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, that its rate of chang...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra, that surrounds and escorts it, -- or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it a...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"The present image shoots its perspective far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which lie the thoughts as yet un-born."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1922

"Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: 2001

"in you the in moon / its rays entwined in my mind's / hair hangs down right in"

— Hollo, Anselm (b. 1934)

Date: March, 2014

"Culture: a kind of knife: / cuts one way     opens / your brain to a certain / breed of light     shaves / consciousness to its // purpose, its cross."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)