Date: 2001

"If I looked at this pitted and pocked wall microscopically enough the visual data would fill my brain entirely."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2005

"What suffocates the land / In the memory of a garbage can / Memory of a garbage can?"

— Bird, Andrew (b. July 11, 1973)

Date: 2006

"More and more in recent weeks, he had found himself approaching likewise the condition of an empty cylinder, ony intermittently occupied by intelligent thought."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2006

"Curses, outbursts / and distracting chants simmer all day / long in the Crock-Pots of our heads."

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: August 3, 2009

"Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don't want to wake up the person who's in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple's smooth machine and click it on."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)

Date: 2010

"His cell was a concrete box six feet by ten with one window and a steel door with a slot wide enough to slip his hands through but that was all, and most of the time he just lay there on his cot, his mind so blank it was like a pail with nothing in it."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"The idea of sex with a woman, of 'having a lesbian lover,' was simply unthinkable, like living alone at the North Pole or deciding to become a lycanthrope. If the thought existed at all, it was a mote, a sweet nothing--a little 'feather on the breath of God,' barely sensed now and then, but most...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: October 31, 2011

"And then there were the experiments, each one a snapshot into the dark box of the brain."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: 2011

"And the wind will be dirty in his hair, and there will be no decent place left in his heart because in all this chasing nothing he will have scrubbed it out, scrubbed it hollow, and nothing can fill it back up but words he makes as beautiful as he can."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: 2011

"Clean out my heart, you know? It's like a crowded old garage. It needs emptying and sorting."

— Nadzam, Bonnie