Date: 1654

"The eyes and the ears are the inlets or doors of the soul, through which innumerable objects enter."

— Bradstreet, Anne (1612-1672)

Date: 1654

"The certainty that that time will come, together with the uncertainty, how, where, and when, should make us so to number our days to apply our hearts to wisdom, that when we are put out of these houses of clay we may be sure of an everlasting habitation that fades not away."

— Bradstreet, Anne (1612-1672)

Date: 1893

A woman's nature "is like a great house full of rooms ... and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."

— Wharton, Edith (1862-1937)

Date: 1966, 1968

"Otherwise they [the people we used to be] turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 2010

"The Professor was my very own bespoke monstre sacrée for so long--so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth--that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial shtick: a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol asp...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: February 4, 2012

"That sounds like stop-and-go mindfulness--focusing on the lives of other creatures to dispel the usual mind theaters that plague us."

— Ackerman, Diane (b. 1948)

Date: September 18, 2016

"In the red glare of the digital clock, my brain rattled its cage."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: September 18, 2016

"In the bunk bed of your mind, he's the compassionate brother lying a few feet above you, a voice in the darkness promising he'll talk until you drift off."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: February 18, 2017

"'He lives inside his head, where he runs the same continuous loop of conflict with people he turns into enemies for the purposes of his psychodrama,' says Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)