Date: 2002

"Of the friend watching him leave remembering / the story of her body / with his once and the stories of their children / made with other people and how his mind went on / pressing hers like a body."

— Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)

Date: 2006

"If our thoughts / and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste / of bile when we're defeated and be flavored / faintly with grace on better days?"

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2006

"While the amygdala's role as a sentinel and trigger for distress is old news to neuroscience, its social role, as part of the brain's system for emotional contagion, has been revealed only recently."

— Goleman, Daniel (b. 1946)

Date: 2009

"Like some inoperable cancerous thing inside his brain, a new mental organ had awakened, insistently and without mercy pushing him forward, punishing him with guilt, compelling him to feel things and want things that can't be argued for or against on the basis of logical reasoning, analy...

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2009

"Whatever else has happened to him, the moral thing that erupted in his mind hasn't gone into remission. If anything, it has only metastasized, secretly colonizing, under the cover of this last month's madness, more and more of his sense of self."

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2010

"In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"One bore the Professorial stigmata, if only brainular, for years."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: April 18, 2011

"And so it goes, researchers say, with most study sessions: difficulty builds mental muscle, while ease often builds only confidence."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: 2011

"There will be such an awful beauty in your heart. A wound like a seal upon it."

— Nadzam, Bonnie