Date: 1936
"The monarch of the mind is a monkey wrench."
preview | full record— Miller, Henry (1891-1980)
Date: 1940
"Well I really wouldn't care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I'd find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter... which doesn't work."
preview | full record— Raphaelson, Samson (1894-1983)
Date: 1942
"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."
preview | full record— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)
Date: 1944; 2018
"My desk is the monument to my mind, and by the appearance of it, my mind must have intimate contact with garbage collectors."
preview | full record— O'Connor, Flannery (1925-1964)
Date: 1946
"Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible."
preview | full record— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)
Date: April 8, 1950
"Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack."
preview | full record— Salinger, J.D. (1919-2010)
Date: 1955, 1958
"It [the title of this book] is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them---as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul."
preview | full record— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)
Date: 1959, 1964
"run your finger along your no-moss mind / that's not a thought that's soot"
preview | full record— O'Hara, Francis Russell "Frank" (1926-1966)
Date: 1960
"Physical things generally, however remote, become known to us only through the effects which they help induce at our sensory surfaces."
preview | full record— Quine, W. V. O. (1908-2000)