Date: 1963

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

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 1966, 1968

"'You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,' Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inn...

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 1966, 1968

"Otherwise they [the people we used to be] turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 1970

"If it goes off / If my imagination detonates, orphans me."

— Dunlap, Mary (1949-2003)

Date: April 15, 1971

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

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

Date: 1980

"What is thought after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate?"

— Robinson, Marilynne (b. 1943)

Date: 1980

"And here we find our greatest affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement."

— Robinson, Marilynne (b. 1943)

Date: 1986

"But it was only the heart's / racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want // until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke / of my body by the last margin of land where the river // mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens, / a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as // bar...

— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)