Date: 2003

"How to hold it all at once, / except by passion's climb, / its rising tides & breathless, / hawk's-eye view?"

— Spaar, Lisa Russ

Date: December 2009

"Like an oyster / That cloisters a spoil of pearls, / Untouched— // The heart that’s had / Enough / Stays shut."

— Essbaum, Jill Alexander

Date: December 13, 2010

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

— Oates, Joyce Carol (b. 1938)

Date: 2015

"His thoughts on his back porch surrounded him like a carpet of mice, immobilizing him via his unwillingness to cause them pain. The mice of introspection were as effective as any buffalo herd."

— Zink, Nell (b. 1964)

Date: April 26, 2016

"It is by this dimension of imaginative relativity that Hogwarts, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Dickens's London, Hemingway's Paris, Didion's anxious California and the mind of Helen Oyeyemi, reclining like a sphinx between her pages in quiet and glittering sleep, all fit inside my tiny apartment, and ...

— Brennan, Summer

Date: September 18, 2016

"Deep in the night, those warnings scuttle around my mind like rats."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: September 18, 2016

"In the red glare of the digital clock, my brain rattled its cage."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)

Date: February 21, 2019

"The brief and hilarious reign of the atheists ('We are all atheists where Odin is concerned!') was over and we were back to being respectful of all religions, except Scientology, which posited that there were viral clams in the mind."

— Lockwood, Patricia

Date: February 21, 2019

"The defences we had developed against the oppressor could only be discussed in the secret room, among others of our kind, as we poured fountains of a wine that was like our shared blood and held out our hearts that were like scraped sparrows."

— Lockwood, Patricia

Date: February 21, 2019

"That the shorthand we developed to describe something could slowly, brightly, wiggle into an example of what it described: 'brain worms', until the whole phenomenon contracted to a single grey inch."

— Lockwood, Patricia