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Date: 1902

"Those traits which float like foam on the surface of a man's being should be put in this category."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

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Date: 1904

"[A]round all the nuclei of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjective."

— James, William (1842-1910)

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Date: 1904

The empiricist universe is "like one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in...

— James, William (1842-1910)

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Date: 1919

"My memories simply trooped the colour."

— Cummings, Bruce Frederick [pseud. W. N. P. Barbellion] (1889-1919)

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Date: 1919

"Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire--and a taste for introspection."

— Cummings, Bruce Frederick [pseud. W. N. P. Barbellion] (1889-1919)

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Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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Date: 1922

"All night, through the eternity of night, / Pain was my portion though I could not feel. / Deep in my humbled heart you ground your heel, / Till I was reft of even my inner light, / Till reason from my mind had taken flight, / And all my world went whirling in a reel."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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Date: 1926

"But he didn't feel very brave, for the word which was really jiggeting about in his brain was 'Heffalumps.'"

— Milne, A. A. (1882-1956)

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Date: 1928, 1978

"Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his m...

— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)

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Date: w. 1936, 1938

"The year plunges into night / and the heart plunges / lower than night // to an empty, windswept place / without sun, stars or moon / but a peculiar light as of thought // that spins a dark fire-- / whirling upon itself until, / in the cold, it kindles // to make a man aware of nothing / that he...

— Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.