Date: 1900

"Jealous for thy authority in thy mansion-house and outward family, but not in the least for thy authority within, in thy chiefest mansion, thy principal economy? Are the servants here to talk high and in what tone they please? Must theirs be the last word, their dictates the rules of action? O s...

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)

Date: 1911

"As for Mr. Woodhouse, whose most famous sentences hang like texts in frames on the four walls of our memories, he is, next to Don Quixote, perhaps the most perfect gentleman in fiction; and under outrageous provocation he remains so."

— Bradley, A.C. (1851-1935)

Date: 1919

"I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul."

— Cummings, Bruce Frederick [pseud. W. N. P. Barbellion] (1889-1919)

Date: 1940

"The provinces of his body revolted, / The squares of his mind were empty, / Silence invaded the suburbs, / The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers."

— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)

Date: 1947

"Thoughts talk to me within / My mind, that shuttered room."

— Sassoon, Siegfried (1886-1967)

Date: 1957

"This direction, of course, is towards the delineation of the domestic life and the private experience of the characters who belong to it: the two go together--we get inside their minds as well as inside their houses."

— Watt, Ian (1917-1999)

Date: 1959

"And I believe in the spurred flame, / Those racing tongues, but cannot come / Out of my heart's unbroken room."

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

Date: 1984

"At any given time, I'm aware that my mind and imagination are setting towards a particular compass point, that the whole edifice is preparing itself to lean in one way, like a great ramshackle barn."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1992

"Surely the mind is not just a faculty: it is an immaterial and private world, the locus of our secret thoughts, the auditorium of our interior monologues, the theatre in which our dreams are staged and our plans rehearsed."

— Kenny, Anthony (b. 1931)

Date: 1992

"After a while, he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a d...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)