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."

— Raphaelson, Samson (1894-1983)

Date: 1942

A highbrow "is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."

— Woolf, Virgina (1882-1941)

Date: 1941, 1942

"I think that his [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1942

"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1942

"I shall keep them [my thoughts] to myself for a time, and when I am older / They will shine as a white worm shines under a green boulder."

— Smith, Stevie (1902-1971)

Date: December, 1942

"Do we act or do we think / when years roll round on a barber's pole, / when what is red is white is pink, / which is body which is soul?"

— Smith, William Jay (1918-2015)

Date: May 27, 1943

"And, once they [the truths] have been digested and have entered into the apparatus of the mind, it is possible for most people to move fairly safely over a terrain otherwise most dangerous."

— Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1946)

Date: w. 1943, 1944

"The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only be reading old books."

— Lewis, C. S. (1898-1963)

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."

— O'Connor, Flannery (1925-1964)

Date: 1944; 2018

"It is pleasanter to be five years older and beautiful than status quo and under par, but I must force my loose mind into its overalls and get going."

— O'Connor, Flannery (1925-1964)