Date: 1790

"Julia retired from the scene with regret. She was enchanted with the new world that was now exhibited to her, and she was not cool enough to distinguish the vivid glow of imagination from the colours of real bliss."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1797

"This place, perhaps, infests my mind with congenial gloom, for I find that, at this moment, there is scarcely a superstition too dark for my credulity."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1854

"I ha' lookn at't an thowt o' thee, Rachael, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa, above a bit, I hope."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1914

"A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1992

"But his mind was eclipsed by the shadow of his father's presence."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1994

"Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)

Date: 2000

"Why was the copula between the brain and the mind plunged in an obligatory darkness?"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2001

"And the sweet fragrance wafting up from the walled garden, the waxing moon already in the sky above the rooftops, the sound of church bells ringing down in the city, and the yellow façade of the tailor's house with its green balcony where Moravec, who as Vera told me had died long ago, frequentl...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2005

"Sometimes I'd be hooked out, plucked and hauled right up into the daylight where I'd find Trevellian shining his torch into me, its shaft falling across my mind's patterned surfaces but managing to occupy them only briefly before it retreated and the inner darkness massed again."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)