Date: 1794

"There was a magnetical sympathy between me and my patron"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1799

"His emotion seemed to communicate itself, with an electrical rapidity, to my heart."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

Thoughts may be kept in "perpetual motion"

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"A sort of electrical sympathy pervaded my companion, and terror and anguish were strongly manifested in the glances which she sometimes stole at me."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1854

"All closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy. The air that would be healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that would ripen it, tear it when caged up. So in her bosom even now; the strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a heap of obdura...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1992

"And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1997

"Mason had more than once caught the old Astronomer watching Susannah with a focus'd Patience he recogniz'd from the Sector Room...as if waiting for a sudden shift in the sky of Passion, like that headlong change in Star Position that had led him to the discovery of the Aberration of Light,-- wai...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"But her innocent attention has reach'd unto the dead Vacuum ever at the bottom of my soul,-- humiliation absolute."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2001

"At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselve...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)