Date: 1800

The fancy may outstrip one's footsteps and be busy picturing and rehearsing

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

The fancy depicts pictures

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

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: 1860

"You have never seen Mr Wakem before, and are possibly wondering whether he was really as eminent a rascal and as crafty, bitter an enemy of honest humanity in general and of Mr Tulliver in particular, as he is represented to be in that eidolon or portrait of him which we have seen to exist in th...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1984

"In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1986

"For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain, as even a statue in marble is worn away by rain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptor's hand gave it."

— Coetzee, J. M. (b. 1940)

Date: 1992

"Even more important to David than the very natural worry that his wife and his son might grow fond of one another was the intoxicating feeling that he had a blank consciousness to work with, and it gave him great pleasure to knead this yielding clay with his artistic thumbs."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1999

"But my mother told me that just the opposite was true. That the pictures in your mind were always more beautiful than what was in the world."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 2001

"In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again it you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print l...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2005

"The van emerged into the scene; men emerged from it and the whole event emerged, like a photo emerging. I didn't even need to see it. I closed my eyes and let it all develop in my mind."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)