Date: 1902
"If it were otherwise, no one could even set down on paper a closely reasoned argument, for the attention would be skipping like a stone hurrying down a sharp incline, or it would be moving hither and thither like a helpless shuttlecock at the mercy of eager players."
preview | full record— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)
Date: 1911
"I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good...
preview | full record— Hulme, T. E. (1883-1917)
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...
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)
Date: 2001
"Pebble, question, soul: no one can see all sides at once, but there is no side that cannot be seen."
preview | full record— Richardson, James (b. 1950)
Date: October 28, 2012
"Each grasped, in the unflinching gaze of the other, a silent acknowledgment of the nobility of man, especially as manifested in work, the work that purified the soul the way steel is purified in the smelter. That sort of thing."
preview | full record— Saunders, George (b. 1958)