Date: 1962

"Sandy screwed her eyes even smaller in the effort of seeing with her mind."

— Spark, Muriel (1918-2006)

Date: 1966, 1968

"'You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,' Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inn...

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 1971, 1978

"Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead."

— Arendt, Hannah (1906-1975)

Date: Summer, 1991

"Elinor's pupils, those less tractable sphincters of the soul, won't close against the hapless hemorrhaging of her visual attention-flow toward Marianne; it is this, indeed, that renders her consciousness, in turn, habitable, inviting, and formative to readers as 'point-of-view.'"

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: 1995

"Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"Mornings when I meditated / I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul, / not the complex mysteries of love and hate."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1999

"It occurred to me that there was not much difference between a real thing that existed in memory, and something that was born in the mind from the start."

— Budnitz, Judy (b. 1973)

Date: 2002

"Of the friend watching him leave remembering / the story of her body / with his once and the stories of their children / made with other people and how his mind went on / pressing hers like a body."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 2006

"If our thoughts / and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste / of bile when we're defeated and be flavored / faintly with grace on better days?"

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2007

"In my mind's eye the road to London is always wet in the winter, and since that is the only eye with which I shall ever see it, wet it remains."

— Gee, Sophie