Date: 1964

"Industrious, affable, having brain on fire, / Henry perplexed himself."

— Berryman, John [b. John Allyn Smith, Jr.] (1914-1972)

Date: 1984

"Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 2001

"Wind, ocean, fire: the things we like to liken our passions to don't break, can't stop."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2006

"That he could enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own."

— McCarthy, Cormac (b. 1933)

Date: April 24, 2011

"God seeks a destiny in all things fired / in the kiln of the sun or the mind."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: July 12, 2013

"The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few—the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head—there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two ...

— Siegel, Lee (b. 1957)

Date: July 5, 2014

"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: September 1, 2014

"Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up."

— Chorost, Michael (b. 1964)

Date: August, 21, 2015

"But this summer, 'The New Yorker' published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared."

— Egan, Timothy (b. 1954)

Date: 2015

"And yes, mortal knells / in sleepless hours, hollow knocks of empty / boats against a dock but still the mind / is a meadow, the heart an ocean even though / it burns."

— Young, Dean (b. 1955)