Date: 1854

"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1992

"No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1996

"One would expect, then, that such a political period would be rife with various veins of pseudo-mysticism, enamoured of whatever gives the slip to the concept, enthralled by those spasms of mind which confound its customary distinctions, which breed in us some ecstatic state of indeterminacy in ...

— Eagleton, Terry (b. 1943)

Date: 2005

"Odd things were unearthed, bits of memory that must have been floating around like the fragment of bone inside my knee."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: December 9, 2015

"But it comes with a troubling idea of what literature is today: a salve for the distracted mind; a groove along which thoughts disordered by the bad habits of centripetal reading might fall back into line."

— Lupton, Christina