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...
preview | full record— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)
Date: 1971, 1978
"Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead."
preview | full record— Arendt, Hannah (1906-1975)
Date: Summer, 1991
"Elinor's pupils, those less tractable sphincters of the soul, won't close against the hapless hemorrhaging of her visual attention-flow toward Marianne; it is this, indeed, that renders her consciousness, in turn, habitable, inviting, and formative to readers as 'point-of-view.'"
preview | full record— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)