Date: 1815

The wavering motions of the mind are like "quivering light" reflected off a confined "crystal flood" in a brass cistern

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: February, 1821

"This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: February, 1821

"I said to myself, 'This is true eloquence: this is a man pouring out his mind on paper.'"

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1902

"Those traits which float like foam on the surface of a man's being should be put in this category."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: November 22, 1990

"I do not feel alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling -- perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"Feelings are like water, they always adapt to their surroundings."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: March 11, 2011

"The huge submerged bulk of the mental iceberg, with its stores of memory and acquired skills that have become automatic, like language, driving and etiquette, supplies people with the raw materials on which they can exercise their reason and decide what to think and what to do."

— Nagel, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: December 11, 2014

"Marginalia is a blow struck against the idea that reading is a one-way process, that readers simply open their minds and the great, unmediated thoughts of the author pour in."

— Miller, Laura

Date: February 21, 2019

"It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not in herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong anima...

— Lockwood, Patricia