Date: 1826

"[T]hen sweet Memory / May come, and with her mirror cheer thy mind, / On whose bright surface lovelier scenes shall live / Than any shrined within Italian climes."

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

Date: 1850

"My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1859

"No dust has settled on one's mind then [at breakfast-time], and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1859

"But you must have perceived long ago that I have no such lofty vocation, and that I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"But then, it is open to some one else to follow great authorities and call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one's knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1963

"Words dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1980

"And here we find our greatest affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement."

— Robinson, Marilynne (b. 1943)

Date: 1984

"Small and far away on the mind's screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood,"

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1992

"After a while, he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a d...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Only this violence could break open a world constrained by the hidden cameras of conscience and vanity."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)