Date: 1892

"Winds of summer fields / Recollect the way,-- / Instinct picking up the key / Dropped by memory."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1963

"Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and piroutted there, absently."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1999

"Another rather simplistic analogy might be a boss, at the centre of a big organization that is eventually going to recruit managers and submanagers. What in the brain could be the equivalent of the boss? The most obvious candidate, and one that might immediately spring to mind, is the basic comp...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 2006

"Desires are your jailers; set them free / and roam the hills, smiling archaically."

— Wetzsteon, Rachel

Date: June 14, 2011

"Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: September 5, 2011

"He [Derek Parfit] pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up...

— MacFarquhar, Larissa

Date: May 20, 2013

"As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter."

— Paglia, Camille (b. 1947)

Date: July 11, 2014

"Roman streets were populated with Greek slaves; their temples with Greek gods; their minds with Greek ideas."

— Hughes, Bettany (b. 1967)

Date: July 17, 2014

"The thoughts don't tend to inspire action, only fear. It's like having a homegrown terrorist in the brain."

— Corbett, Sarah

Date: January 11, 2014

"As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking."

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)