Date: 1963

"I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963, 1965

"This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1963, 1965

"The trees of the mind are black."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

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)

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: November 11, 1967

"Because suddenly, from a height of thousands of centuries, the first stone of an avalanche came tumbling down: it was my heart."

— Lispector, Clarice (1920-1977)

Date: November 11, 1967

"The answer is yes, but there is nothing wrong with having an oblique heart, it is a lighthouse, a compass, wisdom, sharp instinct, experience of death, the power to divine a disquieting but blissful lack of adjustment, because I am discovering that my own maladjustment stems from my origins."

— Lispector, Clarice (1920-1977)

Date: 1970

"God, what a muck-heap my mind is, thought Tallis."

— Murdoch, Iris (191-1999)