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)

Date: July 30, 2011

"I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was 10, but I think that having all those books and sentences composting in my brain may have pushed me toward becoming a writer in the long run."

— Meloy, Maile (born January 1, 1972)

Date: 2014

"Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours, inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope i...

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: 2016

"The plant's radical desire for what has decayed in the soil stands as a figure for memory, the reaching into dark recesses for what used to be alive."

— Wampole, Christy

Date: 2016

"The root's hidden and abject form resembles the unsayable aspects of the psyche."

— Wampole, Christy