Date: February 8, 1996

"These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron."

— Barlow, John Perry (b. 1947)

Date: 1999

"The next day, I changed all my classmates’ names to numbers to better reflect their metal hearts."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 2001

"Pebble, question, soul: no one can see all sides at once, but there is no side that cannot be seen."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2006

"It was a time in Cripple and Victor, Leadville and Creede, when men were finding their way to the unblastable seams of their own secret natures, learning the true names of desire, which spoke, so they dreamed, would open the way through the mountains to all that had been denied them."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2010

"Yet as I lift up this / dull desert stone, the weight of it is full / of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)

Date: 2010

"Be my mind, stone lying on my grave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)

Date: October 28, 2012

"Each grasped, in the unflinching gaze of the other, a silent acknowledgment of the nobility of man, especially as manifested in work, the work that purified the soul the way steel is purified in the smelter. That sort of thing."

— Saunders, George (b. 1958)

Date: June 19, 2013

"Where they (it was held) re-made the world visually and emotionally in the smithies of their tortured souls (to paraphrase James Joyce), Warhol blithely swiped subject matter from mass media."

— Sartwell, Crispin (b. 1958)

Date: July 26, 2016

"But it is true that she told none of these types of personal anecdotes that help people watching at home form impressions from mental clay."

— Haberman, Maggie (b. 1973)

Date: February 27, 2017

"And I don't want to pray, but I can picture / the plants deepening right now into the soil, / wanting to live, so I lie down among them, / in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered / in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt / that's been turned and turned like a problem / in the mind."

— Limón, Ada (b. March 28, 1976)