Date: 2008

"Time rolls the back wheels of my mind / You helped me put the brakes on, 'cause you're kind."

— Flynn, Johnny (March 14, 1983)

Date: 2009

"He steered his thoughts away from the subject of sex, his brain as nimble as an aircraft carrier."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: August 3, 2009

"After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)

Date: Summer 2009

"It is in this sense that the first-personal perspective is strictly unavoidable: I am not a passenger on a vessel pulled hither and yon by impulses and desires; I have to steer."

— Pippin, Robert B. (b. 1948)

Date: April 25, 2011

"'I knew I had some intellectual horsepower,' he says. 'But I didn't know where my tires would catch purchase.'"

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: November 2011

"The warp drive in my brain clicked, and I remember looking up from the magazine 10 or 15 minutes later and staring through the library window to the sun-bright parking lot of the supermarket across the way, as if checking to make sure everything was still where it had been the last time I looked."

— Wolcott, James (b. 1952)

Date: October 31, 2011

"Scientists now know that the brain runs largely on autopilot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: October 31, 2011

"In short, the brain sustains a sense of unity not just in the presence of its left and right co-pilots."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: November 21, 2012

"I've come to believe that a good cry is like a carwash for the soul."

— Hayes, Bill

Date: July 23, 2012

"I'm O.K., you tell them, but with each passing week the depression deepens. You try to describe it. Like someone flew a plane into your soul. Like someone flew two planes into your soul."

— Díaz, Junot (b. 1968)