Date: September 27, 2012

"The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation."

— Lilla, Mark (b. 1956)

Date: July 23, 2012

"I'm O.K., you tell them, but with each passing week the depression deepens. You try to describe it. Like someone flew a plane into your soul. Like someone flew two planes into your soul."

— Díaz, Junot (b. 1968)

Date: 2012

"Once, borracho, at breakfast, / he said: The heart can only be broken / / once, like a window."

— Corral, Eduardo C.

Date: July 10, 2012

"What do you think my brain is made for / Is it just a container for the mind? This great grey matter."

— Frank Ocean [Christopher Edwin Breaux] (b. October 28, 1987)

Date: April 15, 2013

"Big data is like the offensive coordinator up in the booth at a football game who, with altitude, can see patterns others miss. But the head coach and players still need to be on the field of subjectivity."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: June 19, 2013

"Where they (it was held) re-made the world visually and emotionally in the smithies of their tortured souls (to paraphrase James Joyce), Warhol blithely swiped subject matter from mass media."

— Sartwell, Crispin (b. 1958)

Date: July 1, 2013

"Many lines of poetry are so long-embedded in my memory that I find them appearing when I speak or write. Sometimes I am quoting. Sometimes I am unconsciously drawing from the reservoir."

— Ebert, Roger (1942-2013)

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: February 15, 2013

"We become a nation of survivalists, alone in the bunkers of our mind, with nothing but empty static on the radio."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

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)