Date: 1946
"At their best, they erect a grammatical artifice in which mental balconies and watch towers, as well as bridges and recesses, decorate the main structure."
preview | full record— Gerth, Hans H. (1908-1978) and C. Wright Mills (1916-1962)
Date: 1947, 1958
"Turned back upon himself, secure within some imaginary inner fortress, he is the plaything of every hallucination, every spontaneous or deliberate ideological illusion."
preview | full record— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)
Date: 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951
"It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower."
preview | full record— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)
Date: 1954
"The furniture of our minds consists of what we hear, read, observe, discuss and think each day."
preview | full record— Watson, Thomas J. (1874-1956)
Date: 1957
"This direction, of course, is towards the delineation of the domestic life and the private experience of the characters who belong to it: the two go together--we get inside their minds as well as inside their houses."
preview | full record— Watt, Ian (1917-1999)
Date: 1959
Dostoevsky advances "in the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul."
preview | full record— Steiner, George (b. 1929)
Date: 1961
"A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own day, if we are wililng to admit that what was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become a castle of conscience."
preview | full record— Foucault, Michel (1926-1984)
Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973
"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."
preview | full record— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)
Date: 1964
"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...
preview | full record— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)
Date: 1966, 1968
"Otherwise they [the people we used to be] turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."
preview | full record— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)