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Date: 1914

"I think with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for all his sweetness, he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul."

— de Cleyre, Voltairine (1866-1912)

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Date: 1916

"Little minds, like weak liquors, are soonest soured."

— Wilstach, Frank J.

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Date: 1920

"To use a metaphor, it is as if the activity of the suppressed body of experience is accompanied by an affective disturbance which boils over on certain occasions, so that some of the steam reaches the conscious level, while the main disturbance still continues to be wholly cut off from conscious...

— Rivers, William H. R. (1864-1922)

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Date: 1921

"I know what my heart is like / Since your love died: / It is like a hollow ledge / Holding a little pool / Left there by the tide, / A little tepid pool, / Drying inward from the edge."

— Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)

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Date: 1922

"My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

— Hughes, Langston (1902-1967))

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Date: 1922

"You yielded to my touch with gentle grace, / And though my passion was a mighty wave / That buried you beneath its strong embrace, / You were yet happy in the moment's grave."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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Date: 1922

"The joy in your maturity at length, / The peace that filled my soul like cooling wine, / When you responded to my tender strength, / And pressed your heart exulting into mine."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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Date: 1922

"The mists will shroud me on the utter height, / The salty, brimming waters of my breast / Will mingle with the fresh dews of the night / To bathe my spirit hankering to rest."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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Date: 1925

"A man of action is likely to be a poor thinker, if a thinker at all, while the ideal of the sage, the stoic for instance, is to live detached and to keep his soul motionless like a still lake which impassively mirrors the fleeting skies."

— Ortega y Gasset, José (1883-1955)

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Date: 1927

"As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them, no one could help me with any ...

— Proust, Marcel (1871-1922)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.