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)

Date: 1935

"Not I, to whom the scraggly, unpruned emotions of many modern poets seem almost indecenly luxurious."

— North, Jessica Nelson (1891-1988)

Date: 1960

"Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants."

— Quine, W. V. O. (1908-2000)

Date: April 15, 1971

"You've got a geranium in your cranium."

— Lederer, Esther [Ann Landers] (1918-2002)

Date: 1989

"Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization."

— Churchland, Paul (b. 1942)

Date: 2001

"The mind is like those floating islands of vegetation whose roots grasp not the earth but each other."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: July 30, 2011

"I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was 10, but I think that having all those books and sentences composting in my brain may have pushed me toward becoming a writer in the long run."

— Meloy, Maile (born January 1, 1972)

Date: December 15, 2015

"I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: July 11 & 18, 2016

"He has Trumpmunity: his notions are so low and have been so many times decried, and yet they keep arriving, in new and escalating varieties, and the liberal imagination wilts."

— Saunders, George (b. 1958)

Date: 2016

"The plant's radical desire for what has decayed in the soil stands as a figure for memory, the reaching into dark recesses for what used to be alive."

— Wampole, Christy