Date: 1970

"I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading into the interior."

— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)

Date: 1980

"The back of the mind is a small hotel / And when the residents go on picnics / Or take buckets and spades down to the sea / The betrayals begin."

— Longley, Michael (b. 1939)

Date: July, 2015 [1983]

"Marx taught us in fact to understand once and for all what implacable work the unknown, the infinite vanquished victors, carry out in the societies that would prefer to ignore them, as well as within ourselves; what tunnels they dig, what blast-holes they prepare even inside those who hate them ...

— Lattes, Franco [Franco Fortini] (1917-1994)

Date: 1984

"At any given time, I'm aware that my mind and imagination are setting towards a particular compass point, that the whole edifice is preparing itself to lean in one way, like a great ramshackle barn."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)

Date: 1992

"Surely the mind is not just a faculty: it is an immaterial and private world, the locus of our secret thoughts, the auditorium of our interior monologues, the theatre in which our dreams are staged and our plans rehearsed."

— Kenny, Anthony (b. 1931)

Date: 1992

"After a while, he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a d...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Whenever she thought of what she was meant to say, it seemed to dash around the corner, and lose itself in the crowd of things she should not say. The most successful fugitives were often the dullest, the sentences that nobody notices until they are not spoken: 'How nice to see you...won't you s...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"The rotten floorboards of his thoughts gave way one after another until the ground itself seemed no fitter than sodden paper to catch his fall."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1995

"In what way is the mind like a computer that is different from its resemblance, for example, to a telephone switchboard (which was the most popular image in psychology some years ago), or to a cathedral, which once long ago was also a major poetical image (consider: the caverns of the mind, the ...

— Shipley, Thorne (1927-2009)

Date: 1997

"What caretaker, what Verger of the Temple of the Self...?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)