Date: March 1843

"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1854

"What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!"

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1860

"Maggie Tulliver, you perceive was by no means that well-trained, well-informed young person that a small female of eight or nine necessarily is in these days: she had only been to school a year at St Ogg's, and had so few books that she sometimes read the dictionary; so that in travelling over h...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1951

"And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind."

— Bradbury, Ray (1920-2012)

Date: 1984

"Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1984

"The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down ...

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1992

"What I object to is that we turn ignorance into an inner landscape and pretend that this allegorical enterprise, which might be harmless or even charming, if it weren't so expensive and influential, amounts to a science."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. . There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping a...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"'I must have done,' I said, feeling the memory of another dozen books slide down Lethe's greasy banks."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)