Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789

"Like a snow-ball, the mind, fraught with peace in its prime, / Moves swiftly adown the steep shelvings of Time; / Accumulates filth from Society's sons, / And strengthens and hardens its coat as it runs; / Till habit on habit is negligent laid, / And the object appears motley, vile, and ill-made...

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

Date: 1820

"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1904

"[A]round all the nuclei of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjective."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1998

"His nakedness against the sheet, the wanton tangle of bedclothes by his ankle, and the sight of his own genitalia, at his age not yet fully obscured by the swell and spread of his gut, sent vague sexual thoughts floating across his mind like remote summer clouds."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: January 11, 2014

"It's [concerning sleep loss] like the difference between a snowstorm's disrupting a single day of trash pickup and a prolonged strike. No longer quite as easy to fix, and even when the strike is over, there's likely to be some stray debris floating around for quite some time yet."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

Date: February 21, 2019

"It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not in herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong anima...

— Lockwood, Patricia