He could see, for instance, that a certain key would not fit the lock, and yet he continued to try and insert it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1886).
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He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to…But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated.
Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful (1991).
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I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).
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Wel I cant say for cern no mor if I had any of them things in my mynd befor she tol me but ever since then it seams like they all ways ben there. Seams like I ben all ways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it dont think like us. Our woal life is a idea we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980).