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...

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

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."

— 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...

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: 1963

"What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

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."

— 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."

— 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...

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963

"The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963

"Words dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963

"Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and piroutted there, absently."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)