Date: 1946

"A ghost is someone: death has left a hole / For the lead-colored soul to beat the fire"

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

Date: 1984

"The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1992

"Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. . There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping a...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Or--he must stop thinking about it--or [his consciousness seemed] like a solution of saturated copper sulphate under the microscope, when it suddenly transforms and crystals break out everywhere on its surface."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Their souls are crumbling like a dirt clod, hold."

— Pavement

Date: February 8, 1996

"These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron."

— Barlow, John Perry (b. 1947)

Date: 1998

"Anxieties about work transmuted into the baser metal of simple night fear: illness and death, abstractions that soon found their focus in the sensation he still felt in his left hand."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 2000

"At first he tried to contain this chaos: surely there were choices behind these analogies, desires behind the choices, psychological structures behind the desires, and, underlying the psychology, the stainless steel of generative grammar."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I glimpsed a molten core to consciousness, a protean heat where everything could be reshaped. Yes, a molten core, like the core of the earth, deeper than the deposits of civilisation, beyond the complacencies of archaeology."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)