Date: 1959
"The heart's tough shell is still to crack / When, spent of all its wine and bread, / Unwinkingly the altar lies / Wreathed in its sour breath, cold and dead, / A server has put out its eyes."
preview | full record— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)
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)
Date: 1962
"Her mind was as full of religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time."
preview | full record— Spark, Muriel (1918-2006)
Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973
"Memory is, really, in itself, a tool, one of the many tools that an artist uses; and some recollections, perhaps intellectual rather than emotional, are very brittle and sometimes apt to lose the flavor of reality when they are immersed by the novelist in his book, when they are given away to ch...
preview | full record— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)
Date: 1962
"I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing, or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable t...
preview | full record— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)
Date: 1963
"Then he started talking about let a equal acceleration and let t equal time and suddenly he was scribbling letters and numbers and equals signs all over the blackboard and my mind went dead."
preview | full record— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)
Date: 1963
"At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains."
preview | full record— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)
Date: 1963
"After that--in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas...
preview | full record— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)