Date: 1873

"There thou sittest in thy wonted corner / Lone and awful in thy darkened mind."

— Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891)

Date: 1893

"Thy mind is like a crystal brook / Wherein clean creatures live at ease / In sun-bright waves or shady nook."

— Gilder, Richard Watson (1844-1809)

Date: 1955, 1958

"It [the title of this book] is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them---as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1955, 1958

"It will be dark out there / with the Salvation Army Band. / And the mind its own illumination."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1988

"Mind in its purest play is like some bat / That beats about in caverns all alone, / Contriving by a kind of senseless wit / Not to conclude against a wall of stone."

— Wilbur, Richard (1921- )

Date: 1988

"The mind is like a bat."

— Wilbur, Richard (1921- )

Date: 1999

"Working memory has been called the 'chalkboard of the mind.'"

— Siegel, Dan J. (b. 1957)

Date: 2008

"In a sense, the mind works like a flashlight: When you point a flashlight at an object in a dark room, that object emerges from the darkness, as if coming into existence."

— Somov, Pavel G.

Date: February 15, 2011

"If you want to use a memory palace for permanent storage, you have to take periodic time-consuming mental strolls through it to keep your images from fading."

— Foer, Joshua

Date: February 15, 2011

"In other words, natural memory is the hardware you’re born with. Artificial memory is the software you run on it."

— Foer, Joshua