Date: 2002

"Spiders swing through my heart."

— Wright, Charles (b. 1935)

Date: 2005

"It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2006

"The reptile brain, creeping out to sun itself."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"Weber still saw the rarest of butterflies, fluttering mind, its paired wings pinned to the film in obscene detail."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"A camel, that's what you are. A camel of consciousness."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2007

"She had a mind like a mongoose but she was not, in the end, a worldly woman."

— Díaz, Junot (b. 1968)

Date: 2007

"When panic grips your body and your heart is a hummingbird, / Raven thoughts blacken your mind until you're breathing in reverse, / All your friends and sedatives mean well, but make it worse, / Every reassurance just magnifies the doubt, / Better find yourself a place to level out."

— Oberst, Conor Mullen (b. 1980)

Date: 2007

"Got a cricket for a conscience, always looks the other way."

— Oberst, Conor Mullen (b. 1980)

Date: 2008

"Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while wait...

— Adiga, Aravind (b. 1974)

Date: 2008

"Oh Bryn, you see through the dark, / Right past the fireflies that sleep in my heart."

— Koenig, Ezra (b. 1984) [Vampire Weekend]