Date: 1790

"His disturbed mind resembled a tempestuous flood, whose waves arise dark and turbulent, except where the sun-beam throws a line of trembling radiance across their agitated surface."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

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: 1949

"Rather, to relapse perforce into simile, it is supposed that mental processes are phosphorescent, like tropical sea-water, which makes itself visible by the light which it itself emits."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1990

"The noise the body makes / when the body meets / the soul over the soul's ocean and penumbra / is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, / a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood / into the ear; a lover's / heart-shaped tongue; / flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; / the butcher working / at ...

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1992

"His thoughts shimmered like a hesitating stream, gathering into pools of discrete and vivid imagery."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

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: October 137, 2017

"But, because political campaigns occasionally can be wonderful bathyspheres to your soul’s dark abyss, we are learning that Moore’s is plenty deep and plenty dark."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)