Date: 1799

"They thought and acted in different but not discordant keys."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1799

"I never cried in my life, sine I was knee-high, but curse me if I ever felt in better tune for the business than just then."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1865

"Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul, / With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, / There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim."

— Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)

Date: 1892

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all, // And sweetest in the gale is heard."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1936

"The way / to certainty is charted now, / the sensitive ears alive to sound, / antennae poised for touch, and in the head / all tissue quivering like violin strings."

— Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954)

Date: 2010

"The sounds came from everywhere, filled up her mind like a chorus, ricocheting like the sound of gunfire, like the gunfire in the field, like her mother's voice crying from the doorway."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"A thought to mind, so to the string / plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is, / a wrinkling of the air as immaterial / and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)

Date: April 4, 2011

"For in mind should be voidy wings choiring, not selves."

— Williams, C. K. (b. 1936)

Date: 2017

"And my brain is like an orchestra / Playing on, insane"

— Lenker, Adrianne

Date: February 26, 2019

"But the real magic is witnessing her mind and imagination at work. They are as fertile and supple as jazz."

— McBride, James (b. September 11, 1957)