Date: 1760-7
"With all my precautions, how was my system turned topside turvy in the womb with my child! his head exposed to the hand of violence, and a pressure of 470 pounds averdupois weight acting so perpendicularly upon its apex---that at this hour 'tis ninety per Cent. insurance, that the fine network o...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1774
"A learned parson, rusting in his cell, at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, h...
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1776
"I am provoked at this natural incapacity of conveying my sentiments to you; words are but a cloak, or rather a clog, to our ideas; there should be no curtain before the hearts of friends; and the longing I have ever felt for an intuitive converse, is to me a strong argument for a future state."
preview | full record— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)
Date: 1788
"Emmeline would then have taken him; but she said no; and sitting down on the ground, held him in her lap, till Barret who had seen her from a window, came out and took him from her; to which, as to a thing usual, she consented, and then walked calmly home with Emmeline, who, extremely discompose...
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1805
"Your Worth and Talents will unfold, / Richer than Needlework of Gold; / The native treasures of the soul, / True--as the Needle to the Pole."
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1831
"The sublimest poet that ever sung, was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1900, 1901
"Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,--thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?"
preview | full record— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)
Date: 1968
"my mind a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations, / luminous soft threads, / the thrown glamour, crossing and recrossing, / the twisted sinews underlying the work."
preview | full record— Duncan, Robert (1919-1988)
Date: 2011
"His mind unwinding like a spool of loose thread."
preview | full record— Nadzam, Bonnie