Date: January, 1884

"As a snowflake-crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency and pa...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892

"The thought beneath so slight a film / Is more distinctly seen,-- / As laces just reveal the surge, / Or mists the Apennine."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1898

"Silently we went round and round, / And through each hollow mind / The Memory of dreadful things / Rushed like a dreadful wind, / And Horror stalked before each man, / And Terror crept behind."

— Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: August, 1963

"But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty mill...

— King, Martin Luther [Michael] (1929-1968)

Date: 1997

"Nor might any left behind on the ground see her again,-- would they?-- passing above in the Sky, the sleeves of her garment now catching light like wings...her mind no more than that of a Kite, the Wind blowing through..."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2004

"Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: May 17, 2010

"But Ashbery often writes from the position of the slackened mind, billowing with whatever passes through it; Armantrout generally writes in tautened distress, even when she's being funny."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: 2011

"When he opened the door the man spoke in a low voice, and it was for Lamb as though his head was filling up with snow, his thinking brain temporarily blanked out, eclipsed by the sudden flash of danger."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

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)