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Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973

"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

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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)

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Date: 1964

"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...

— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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Date: 1968

"There is a little man who lives in one's head. The little man keeps a library."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

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Date: 1968

In one's head is "a button on a control panel. The button is marked 'take the left free end of a shoelace in the left hand'. When depressed, it activates a series of wheels, cogs, levers, and hydraulic mechanisms."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

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Date: 1968

"We might thus consider expanding the population in one's head to include subordinate little men who superintend the execution of the 'elementary' behaviors involved in complex sequences like grasping a shoelace."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

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