Date: 1854

"And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: April, 1871

"A hot flash seems to burn across the brain."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"In the same way, I think, experience proves that no one who has had real passionate conviction of a creed, the sort of emotion that burns hot upon the brain, can ever be indifferent to that creed again."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: 1920

"The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all...

— Lukács, Georg (1885-1971)

Date: 2001

"Wind, ocean, fire: the things we like to liken our passions to don't break, can't stop."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2010

"Brain on fire, I then leadfooted it at once back to my mother's house."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"Yet seared into my brain forever is one of her parting utterances: a cool assessment--delivered with ghoulish panache as she and my friend were about to leave--of the Professor in the sack."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: July 12, 2013

"The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few—the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head—there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two ...

— Siegel, Lee (b. 1957)

Date: July 5, 2014

"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: September 1, 2014

"Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up."

— Chorost, Michael (b. 1964)