Date: 2006

"You doused my soul with gasoline / You flicked a match into my brain."

— Sonic Youth [Kim A Gordon, Thurston Joseph Moore, Lee M Ranaldo, Steven Shelley]

Date: February 1, 2010

"Burn the body down / And, with it, out goes the pilot / Blue light of the mind."

— Cruz, Cynthia

Date: 2010

"Brain on fire, I then leadfooted it at once back to my mother's house."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"Yet seared into my brain forever is one of her parting utterances: a cool assessment--delivered with ghoulish panache as she and my friend were about to leave--of the Professor in the sack."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: April 24, 2011

"God seeks a destiny in all things fired / in the kiln of the sun or the mind."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 2011

"He felt ash filling up his chest and throat from the inside, blocking his mouth and thickening his heart and filling up his head, he hoped, blocking it out like the heavy gray ceiling of winter settling in over the plains, so that he would not be able to see into it."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: July 12, 2013

"The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few—the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head—there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two ...

— Siegel, Lee (b. 1957)

Date: July 5, 2014

"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: September 1, 2014

"Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up."

— Chorost, Michael (b. 1964)

Date: August, 21, 2015

"But this summer, 'The New Yorker' published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared."

— Egan, Timothy (b. 1954)