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: 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)

Date: April 15, 1971

"You've got a geranium in your cranium."

— Lederer, Esther [Ann Landers] (1918-2002)

Date: Summer, 1991

"Elinor has constructed herself in this way around an original lack: the absentation of her sister, and perhaps in the first place the withholding from herself of the love of their mother, whom she then compulsively unites with Marianne, the favorite, in the love-drenched tableaux of her imaginat...

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

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: November 8, 1994

"I thought this is some terrific computer down here."

— Blakeslee, Sandra

Date: 2003

"In fact, it seems quite plausible that some version of this axiom (perhaps 'Even a paranoid can have enemies,' uttered by Henry Kissinger) is so indelibly inscribed in the brains of baby boomers that it offers us the continuing illusion of possessing a special insight into the epistemologies of ...

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: December 13, 2010

"Hospital vigils take place in slow-time, during which the mind floats free, like a frail balloon drifting into the sky."

— Oates, Joyce Carol (b. 1938)

Date: December 13, 2010

"Like butterflies with frayed wings, thoughts fly at me in random and rapid succession."

— Oates, Joyce Carol (b. 1938)

Date: 2010

"With the rap of the gavel, the Judge Judy tribunal in my brain, permanently empowered, was at once in session and I found myself under harsh cross-examination."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)