Date: 1791, 1794

"My daily employment is to think of you and weep, to pray for your happiness and deplore my own folly: my nights are scarce more happy, for if by chance I close my weary eyes, and hope some small forgetfulness of sorrow, some little time to pass in sweet oblivion, fancy, still waking, wafts me ho...

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1794

"Retired to her lonely cabin, her melancholy thoughts still hovered round the body of her deceased parent; and, when she sunk into a kind of slumber, the images of her waking mind still haunted her fancy."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1794

"The scenes of the Illiad illapsed in glowing colours to her fancy--scenes, once the haunt of heroes--now lonely, and in ruins; but which still shone, in the poet's strain, in all their youthful splendor."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1795

"Millions of chimeras floated on my imagination all were rejected in speedy succession ere they became old enough to take the colour of reason; yet fancy will be busy till we are no more."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1797

"The beauty of her countenance haunting his imagination, and the touching accents of her voice still vibrating on his heart, he descended to the shore below her residence, pleasing himself with the consciousness of being near her, though he could no longer behold her; and sometimes hoping that he...

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1797

"As they passed with silent steps along the winding rocks, the tranquillity of the landscape below afforded an affecting contrast with the tumult and alarm of their minds."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1992

"It was hard enough to rescue himself from the avalanche of his own feelings, without allowing the gloomy St Bernard of his attention to wander into other fields."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

" He was dangerously obsessed, dangerously obsessed. And his thoughts, like a bobsleigh walled with ice, would not change their course until he had crashed or achieved his end."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1999

"A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)