Date: September 10, 1836

"And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1892

"The thought beneath so slight a film / Is more distinctly seen,-- / As laces just reveal the surge, / Or mists the Apennine."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: August, 1963

"But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty mill...

— King, Martin Luther [Michael] (1929-1968)

Date: 1997

"Nor might any left behind on the ground see her again,-- would they?-- passing above in the Sky, the sleeves of her garment now catching light like wings...her mind no more than that of a Kite, the Wind blowing through..."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2004

"Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind."

— Rankine, Claudia (b. 1963)

Date: May 17, 2010

"But Ashbery often writes from the position of the slackened mind, billowing with whatever passes through it; Armantrout generally writes in tautened distress, even when she's being funny."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: 2011

"When he opened the door the man spoke in a low voice, and it was for Lamb as though his head was filling up with snow, his thinking brain temporarily blanked out, eclipsed by the sudden flash of danger."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: February 21, 2019

"A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind."

— Lockwood, Patricia