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Date: 1892

"Winds of summer fields / Recollect the way,-- / Instinct picking up the key / Dropped by memory."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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Date: November 1914

"All my thoughts are slow and brown."

— Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)

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Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

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Date: 1946

"Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

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Date: 1962

"Is there no way out of the mind?"

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

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Date: 1963

"Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake / heavy with useless experience, rich / with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, / crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge / of mere fact."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

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Date: 1963

"Delicious recollections / float like perfume through the memory."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

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Date: 2002

"There is the story of the mind's temperature neither cold nor celibate."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

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Date: 2003

"Believe the fallen leaf / from one world floats there, / in another, tawny star on the black water, / the soul's cradle, / even when he must pause / to rest his racing heart, / & cannot see it?"

— Spaar, Lisa Russ

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Date: 2004

"Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.