Date: 1922

"Your lustrous-warm eyes are too sadly kind / To mask the meaning of your dreamy tale, / Your guarded life too exquisitely frail / Against the daggers of my warring mind."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1928

"As Irish Lovers use to make Address / By Darting Rushes at their Mistresses, / That do more Execution then the Darts / And Bows and Arrows [are] us'd to Conquer hearts."

— Butler, Samuel (1613-1680)

Date: 1949-1952, 1953

"Hard, hard work, excavating and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable t...

— Bellow, Saul (1915-2005)

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: 1990

"But now I rock a bar stool and I drink for two / Just pondering this time bomb in my mind."

— John Linnell and John Flansbaugh [They Might Be Giants]

Date: 1992

"No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"This is after all the heart of the matter, the place where everything -- not without difficulty, not without civil war, not without nailing down my tongue and drawing over it the serrated knife of one thing after another, not without learning to thank my torturers because it's been such a growth...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: July 23, 2012

"I'm O.K., you tell them, but with each passing week the depression deepens. You try to describe it. Like someone flew a plane into your soul. Like someone flew two planes into your soul."

— Díaz, Junot (b. 1968)

Date: February 15, 2013

"We become a nation of survivalists, alone in the bunkers of our mind, with nothing but empty static on the radio."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: May 7, 2014

"You learn to keep your mental body armor handy to protect against sudden attacks -- providing precious seconds to collect yourself and fight back."

— Armeni, Damon T.