Date: 1783

"While we listen to a discourse, or read a book, how often , in spite of all our care, does the fancy wander, and present thoughts quite different from those we have in view! "

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1785

"[W]hen the mind is absent, and the thoughts are wandering to something else than what is passing in the place in which we are, we are often miserable"

— Paley, William (1743-1805)

Date: 1919

"My memories simply trooped the colour."

— Cummings, Bruce Frederick [pseud. W. N. P. Barbellion] (1889-1919)

Date: January 11, 2014

"It's [concerning sleep loss] like the difference between a snowstorm's disrupting a single day of trash pickup and a prolonged strike. No longer quite as easy to fix, and even when the strike is over, there's likely to be some stray debris floating around for quite some time yet."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: August, 22, 2015

"Some philosophers claim that we know nothing of the external world outside our minds--nothing compared to what sways in our minds, in the long, twisting corridors of memory, the vast mental rooms with half-open doors, the ghosts chattering beneath the chandeliers of imagination."

— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)

Date: November 15, 2016

"He [Trump] has set the worst human impulses marching. But there are no clean slates in the unconscious."

— Rose, Jacqueline (b. 1949)

Date: February 21, 2019

"What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations?"

— Lockwood, Patricia