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...
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1860
"That new inward life of hers, notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions, yet shone out in her face with a tender soft light that mingled itself as added loveliness with the gradually enriched colour and outline of her blossoming youth"
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Date: 1877
"For in their bond of mutual recognition or brain-consciousness, the sense apparatus, in all, is external to the centre storehouse or emporium of consciousness."
preview | full record— Battye, Richard Fawcett
Date: 1887
"You see, he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose."
preview | full record— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)
Date: 1892
"One need not be a chamber to be haunted, / One need not be a house; / The brainĀ has corridors surpassing / Material place."
preview | full record— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)
Date: 1900, 1901
"We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, e...
preview | full record— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)
Date: 1940
"The provinces of his body revolted, / The squares of his mind were empty, / Silence invaded the suburbs, / The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers."
preview | full record— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)
Date: 1949-1952, 1953
"Hard, hard work, excavating and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable t...
preview | full record— Bellow, Saul (1915-2005)
Date: 1964
"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...
preview | full record— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)
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...
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)