Date: 1939

"My thinking relates to theology like the blotting page to the ink. It has entirely soaked itself full with it. If the blotting paper had its way, nothing that is written would remain."

— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)

Date: 1940

"The provinces of his body revolted, / The squares of his mind were empty, / Silence invaded the suburbs, / The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers."

— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)

Date: 1940

"In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start."

— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)

Date: 1940

"Well I really wouldn't care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I'd find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter... which doesn't work."

— Raphaelson, Samson (1894-1983)

Date: 1941, 1942

"I think that his [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1942

"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: December, 1942

"Do we act or do we think / when years roll round on a barber's pole, / when what is red is white is pink, / which is body which is soul?"

— Smith, William Jay (1918-2015)

Date: May 27, 1943

"And, once they [the truths] have been digested and have entered into the apparatus of the mind, it is possible for most people to move fairly safely over a terrain otherwise most dangerous."

— Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1946)

Date: w. 1943, 1944

"The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only be reading old books."

— Lewis, C. S. (1898-1963)