Date: September 12, 2016

"'Ayahuasca takes you to the swampland of your soul,' my friend Tony, a photographer in his late fifties, told me."

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: September 12, 2016

"Her boyfriend added, 'Consciousness is its own economy.'"

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: September 12, 2016

"'I thought I had completely fried my motherboard,' he continued. 'I remember saying, ''I will never do this again.''"

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: September 12, 2016

"'Indigenous prophesies point to an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean,' Daniel Pinchbeck wrote in his exploration of ayahuasca, technology, and Mayan millennialism, '2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.'"

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: September 12, 2016

"I was going to visit the swampland of my soul, make peace with death, and become one with the universe."

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: September 12, 2016

"Any second now, I would be descending into the pit of my being, seeing serpents, experiencing my own death or birth--or something--and I did not necessarily want that to happen in a windowless vomitorium while a millennial in crazy pants had her first psychotic episode."

— Levy, Ariel (b. 1974)

Date: September 12, 2016

"'Memorial' wasn't a translation of Homer: the Iliad was its neutral backdrop, lit up by Oswald's flares of mind."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: September 12, 2016

"Her images tend to thwart the mind--which keeps rusty handles and voices in separate boxes--in a direct appeal to the senses."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: October 10, 2016

"Patrick Collison, the C.E.O. of the electronic-payments company Stripe, likened Altman's brain to the claw machine on a carnival midway: 'It roams around but has the ability to plunge very deep when necessary.'"

— Friend, Tad (b. 1962)

Date: September 18, 2016

"Deep in the night, those warnings scuttle around my mind like rats."

— Kennedy, Pagan (b. 1963)