Date: March 1843

"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1854

"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many tho...

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1892

"The thought beneath so slight a film / Is more distinctly seen,-- / As laces just reveal the surge, / Or mists the Apennine."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1947, 1958

"Religion, ethics, metaphysics – these are merely the 'spiritual' and 'inner' festivals of human anguish, ways of channelling the black waters of anxiety – and towards what abyss?"

— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)

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: 1992

"Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. . There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping a...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2001

"Both ideas were right in a way at the time, since the new station was literally rising from the ruins of the old Liverpool Street; in any case, the crucial point was hardly this speculation in itself, which was really only a distraction, but the scraps of memory beginning to drift through the ou...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2017

"There was a snowstorm that lasted three days / and a cavern of monochrome memory"

— Burt, Stephanie