Date: 1777

"Thus oft, from shop of brain, I try / To throw the dirt and rubbish by; / But still they gain their former state, / Or leave a vacuum in the pate."

— Savage, Mary (fl. 1763-1777)

Date: 1780

Reason's subjects work and return home with "treasures fraught" and display before their queen their "shining spoils, which are laid up in "mental stores."

— Steele, Anne (1717-1778)

Date: 1785

"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1788

"Mary could not help thinking that in his company her mind expanded, as he always went below the surface. She increased her stock of ideas, and her taste was improved."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"Her mind was unhinged, and passion unperceived filled her whole soul."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"Whenever she did, or said, any thing she thought Henry would have approved of--she could not avoid thinking with anguish, of the rapture his approbation ever conveyed to her heart--a heart in which there was a void, that even benevolence and religion could not fill."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1798

"In making observations upon subjects which are new to us, we must be content to use our memory unassisted at first by our reason; we must treasure up the ore and rubbish together, because we cannot immediately distinguish them from each other."

— Edgeworth, Maria

Date: 1999

"'How do you expect to learn anything when you fill your mind with garbage?' he said."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 2010

"The idea of sex with a woman, of 'having a lesbian lover,' was simply unthinkable, like living alone at the North Pole or deciding to become a lycanthrope. If the thought existed at all, it was a mote, a sweet nothing--a little 'feather on the breath of God,' barely sensed now and then, but most...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2011

"And the wind will be dirty in his hair, and there will be no decent place left in his heart because in all this chasing nothing he will have scrubbed it out, scrubbed it hollow, and nothing can fill it back up but words he makes as beautiful as he can."

— Nadzam, Bonnie