Date: 1892

"Futile the winds / To a heart in port,-- / Done with the compass, / Done with the chart."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1946

"Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie / his rushing brain."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1997

"Forgive me, Friend, I've again presum'd our Minds running before the same Wind."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2003

"So next time you see the homey and his rims spin / Just know my mind is working just like them / (rims, that is)"

— Carter, Shawn Corey (b. 1969) [Jay-Z]

Date: August 3, 2009

"After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)

Date: Summer 2009

"It is in this sense that the first-personal perspective is strictly unavoidable: I am not a passenger on a vessel pulled hither and yon by impulses and desires; I have to steer."

— Pippin, Robert B. (b. 1948)

Date: April 25, 2011

"'I knew I had some intellectual horsepower,' he says. 'But I didn't know where my tires would catch purchase.'"

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: November 2011

"The warp drive in my brain clicked, and I remember looking up from the magazine 10 or 15 minutes later and staring through the library window to the sun-bright parking lot of the supermarket across the way, as if checking to make sure everything was still where it had been the last time I looked."

— Wolcott, James (b. 1952)

Date: October 31, 2011

"Scientists now know that the brain runs largely on autopilot; it acts first and asks questions later, often explaining behavior after the fact."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: October 31, 2011

"In short, the brain sustains a sense of unity not just in the presence of its left and right co-pilots."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)