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]

Date: 2009

"His mind snagged on the word like a fish on a hook."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"These are some of the things // you don't have to know because the melody / is like a small bird, maybe a yellow canary, / that wings its way into your mind / --no, into your heart-- / where there's a perch already // set up for it, a little trapeze / to swing back and forth on as it sings / and...

— Raab, Lawrence (b. 1946)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"As all the thoughts and images of consciousness began to move in directions over which I had no control, and I seemed to be lying there watching them, like a kind of lazy sheepdog of the mind, I knew sleep was around the corner."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"But I didn't want to linger, nor could I perhaps, for the sensation lasted only a few moments, then my brain sank its claws into it and I went back to the kitchen where everything was as I had left it, except for the color of the drinks, which were shiny and full of small, grayish bubbles now."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: June 1, 2010

"Books live in the mind like honey inside a beehive.

— McGrath, Campbell (b. 1962)

Date: June 7, 2010

"They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)