Date: 1691

"However chast his Body may be, his Mind is extreamly prolifick; his thoughts are a perfect Seraglio, and he, like a great Turk, begets thousands of little Infants--Remarks, Fancys, Fantasticks, Crochets and Whirligigs, on his wandring Intellect, and when once begot, they must be bred--so out he ...

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1691

"'Tis true, my Master did advise me (for which I'll pay and ever owe him as many Thanks as Arithmetick can count) to beg my Father's Consent before I rambled again; but my runnagate Mind being set on a galloping Frollick, he might with as much ease have found out the Quadrature of a Circle, or th...

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1691

"And when abroad I go, Fancy shall be / My skilful Coachman, and shall hurry me / Through Heaven and Earth, and Neptune's watery Plain, / And in a moment drive me back again."

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1691

"Observe again, how greedily their Souls, keeping Sentinel in their Ears, lye and catch for words; and how their Souls, in a perpetual emanation gliding from their Eyes, waste themselves in passionate Glances, and suffer many a faint Swoon with gazing."

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1736

"As she was one day sitting alone in her Garden, ruminating on the last Words of her Father, and the strict Injunction laid on her concerning the Carcanet, Emotions, to which hitherto she had been a Stranger, began to diffuse themselves throughout her Mind."

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

Date: August, September, and October, 1779

"Thus it happened with me on the present occasion; and I found my ideas suddenly drawn from the sermon in my hand and (in their vagabond way) hurrying over the birth, parentage, education, and situation of the reverend penman."

— Anonymous

Date: 1800

"The pen is a pacifyer. It checks the mind's career; it circumscribes her wanderings."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)