Date: 1966, 1968

"'You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,' Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inn...

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 1971, 1978

"Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead."

— Arendt, Hannah (1906-1975)

Date: 1971, 1979

"It does not matter whether Le Penseur actually draws his diagrams on paper, or visualizes them as so drawn; and it does not matter whether in his quasi-posing his on appro Socratic questions to himself he speaks these aloud, mutters them under his breath, or only As-If mutters them on his mind's...

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: November 12, 1973

"Mysteries are the food of the mind, and all the fundamental mysteries are necessary to sanity."

— Richards, I.A. (1893-1979)

Date: 1975

"His soul, like his stomach, was in turmoil."

— Lodge, David (b. 1935)

Date: 1983

Die Dogmatiker sind sonderbare Hyänen. Sie nähren sich vom Aas der Gedanken, die sie selbst getötet haben. [The dogmatists are strange hyenas They feed on the carrion of the thoughts that they themselves killed].

— Laub, Gabriel (1928-1998)

Date: 1984

"In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1990

"now you see the / two doctors, behind / you, in mind's eye, / probe into your anus, / or ass, or bottom, / behind you, the roto- / rooter-like device / sees all up, concludes / 'like a worn-out inner tube'"

— Creeley, Robert (1926-2005)

Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: Summer, 1991

"Elinor's pupils, those less tractable sphincters of the soul, won't close against the hapless hemorrhaging of her visual attention-flow toward Marianne; it is this, indeed, that renders her consciousness, in turn, habitable, inviting, and formative to readers as 'point-of-view.'"

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)