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: 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: January 21, 2015

"Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside."

— Burkeman, Oliver (b. 1975)

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: January 12, 2018

"He also shared some thoughts about James Comey--if, by thoughts, you mean the products of the dying sparks of sputtering synapses."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)