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)

Date: May 20, 2013

"As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter."

— Paglia, Camille (b. 1947)

Date: February 28, 2014

"A memory palace assembled ad hoc from brownstone apartments, underground caves and submarine compartments, or a diligently designed, continuously flowing and elegant old Alpine resort?"

— Itzkoff, Dave (b. 1976)

Date: July 27, 2016

"But, gradually, I found myself caught up in the flow of the thing, gliding in my mind around every bend in the river, riding a raft with someone who knows where all the snags and sunken rocks of public life are."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: October 137, 2017

"But, because political campaigns occasionally can be wonderful bathyspheres to your soul’s dark abyss, we are learning that Moore’s is plenty deep and plenty dark."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)