Date: 1854

"t was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1860

"Although when Mr Wakem entered his office that morning, he had had no intention of purchasing Dorlcote Mill, his mind was already made up: Mrs Tulliver had suggested to him several determining motives, and his mental glance was very rapid: he was one of those men who can be prompt without being ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

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: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 2011

"There will be such an awful beauty in your heart. A wound like a seal upon it."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: December 30, 2015

"I had always considered my thoughts as something abstract, but they weren't; they were as material as the heart beating in my chest. The same was true of the mind, the soul, the personality; all of it was fixed in the cells and originated as a result of the various ways in which these cells reac...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2015

"She knew Lee well, and by heading southeast, she had hidden in the folds of his own cerebral cortex."

— Zink, Nell (b. 1964)

Date: January 14, 2016

"Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: July 29, 2016

"In other ways, the speech was an x-ray of Clinton’s soul that gave the public a rare, if distorted, glimpse beneath her shell."

— Fournier, Ron (b. 1963)