Date: 1762-1763

"Youth is the best season wherein to acquire knowledge, tis a season when we are freest from care, the mind is then unencumbered & more capable of receiving impressions than in an advanced age—in youth the mind is like a tender twig, which you may bend as you please, but in age like a sturdy oak ...

— Adams, Abigail (1744-1818)

Date: 1791, 1794

"I will wear a smile on my face, though the thorn rankles in my heart."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1793

"For her own child, all the feelings of a parental bosom vegetated in luxuriance."

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]

Date: 1793

"Mrs. Leason has one child, blessed with good natural abilities, and educated by a less indulgent parent, she might have shone in a domestic character, but when the idea is instilled in the youthful mind, that it is to be indulged in all its wishes, let the disposition be ever so pleasing, the so...

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]

Date: 1793

"If the mind is a barren waste, of what avail are the beauties of the most lovely face, the elegance of the most enchanting shape, the grace of the most accomplished person; the imperceptible hand of time will deprive them of every external charm, and eclipse the lustre of the most penetrating eye."

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]

Date: 1935

"Not I, to whom the scraggly, unpruned emotions of many modern poets seem almost indecenly luxurious."

— North, Jessica Nelson (1891-1988)

Date: 1956

"'Can there be such stubbornness-- / A soul grown feverish, clutching its dead body-tree / Like a last storm-crossed leaf? "

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963

"The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963, 1965

"The trees of the mind are black."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: April 15, 1971

"You've got a geranium in your cranium."

— Lederer, Esther [Ann Landers] (1918-2002)