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: 1984

"In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1990

"now you see the / two doctors, behind / you, in mind's eye, / probe into your anus, / or ass, or bottom, / behind you, the roto- / rooter-like device / sees all up, concludes / 'like a worn-out inner tube'"

— Creeley, Robert (1926-2005)

Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

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.'"

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: 1991

"Zulu Nation, brothers that's creation; / Minds get flooded, ejaculation -- / Right on the two inch tape."

— Tribe Called Quest [Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jarobi White]

Date: 1997

"Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"They were possessing her in ways more intimate than had ever been allow'd him...interfering at orders of minitude invisible to the human Eye, infiltrated without need of light or Map, commanding the further branches of whatever flows in a Soul like blood,...she and her Captors whispering togethe...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2002

A landscape may poise like "A postcard in front of us / As though we'd settled it there, just so, / Halfway between the mind's eye and the mind, just halfway."

— Wright, Charles (b. 1935)

Date: August 12/19, 2002

"In his mind's eye he can see himself coolly flipping the garlic and pepper T-bones on the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the citrus-tarragon trout filets that sizzle fragrantly in the rear."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)