Date: 1865

"Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul, / With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, / There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim."

— Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)

Date: 1892

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all, // And sweetest in the gale is heard."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1900, 1901

"Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,--a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original."

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)

Date: 1902

"However, in the common order of things, alas, 'the mind is an orchestra, where the musicians are not always in agreement; where the conductor, when there is one, is not always obeyed.'"

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1936

"The way / to certainty is charted now, / the sensitive ears alive to sound, / antennae poised for touch, and in the head / all tissue quivering like violin strings."

— Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954)

Date: 1992

"The smell of cocaine assailed him and he felt his nerves stretching like piano wires."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1993

"I didn't need to speak, I could lay thoughts out in his mind like they were a sheet."

— Campion, Jane (b. 1954)

Date: 1998

"But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were the three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring a the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of...

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: December 2009

"To keep your cell the way you keep your soul, / Untidy-minded, neither soiled nor sold / For next to nothing, a treasury of old / Notions like the notes of a piano-roll / Which cannot improvise though it knows a whole / Repertoire, what ought one to withhold?"

— Hine, Daryl (b. 1936)

Date: 2010

"The sounds came from everywhere, filled up her mind like a chorus, ricocheting like the sound of gunfire, like the gunfire in the field, like her mother's voice crying from the doorway."

— Cronin, Justin