Date: 1966, 1968

"Otherwise they [the people we used to be] turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 1968

"There is a little man who lives in one's head. The little man keeps a library."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1968

"This is, I think, perfectly correct. The little man [in one's head], as we might say, has in his library pamphlets entitled 'Tying One's Shoes', 'Speaking Latin', and 'Typing 'Afghanistan"', but no pamphlet entitled 'Being Intelligent' or 'Speaking Latin Fluently' or 'Typing "Afghanistan" with P...

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1997

"What caretaker, what Verger of the Temple of the Self...?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: February 20, 2000

"I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo."

— Ebert, Roger (1942-2013)

Date: 2001

"But loss is a current: the coolness of one side of a wet finger held up, the faint hiss in your ears at midnight, water sliding over the dam at the back of your mind, memory unremembering itself."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2001

"The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time, and this is true from hour to hour as well as from era to era."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: Summer, 2004

"Because of the way we live, the basement of the American mind fills up with the sexual use of other people."

— Greif, Mark (b. 1975)

Date: January 25, 2005

"I'm staring out into that vacuum again / From the back porch of my mind / The only thing that's alive, I'm all there is."

— Oberst, Conor Mullen (b. 1980)

Date: 2006

"Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts."

— McCarthy, Cormac (b. 1933)