Date: 2006

"... moving from the minor mode it had been in throughout into the major, ending with a Picardy third cadence that, if it did not break Lew's heart exactly, did leave a fine crack that in time was to prove unmendable."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

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: 2006

"None of them ever breathed / a word about the fact that this humming, / aromatic, acid flashback, pungent, tingly / fingered world is acted out differently / for each one of us by the puppet theatre / of our senses."

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2006

"Curses, outbursts / and distracting chants simmer all day / long in the Crock-Pots of our heads."

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2006

"If our thoughts / and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste / of bile when we're defeated and be flavored / faintly with grace on better days?"

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2006

"That he could enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own."

— McCarthy, Cormac (b. 1933)

Date: 2006

"Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts."

— McCarthy, Cormac (b. 1933)

Date: 2006

"The brain is a mind-boggling redesign. But it can't escape its past. [...] She pictured those mangled Kearney mansions, glorious old wooden Victorians enlarged with brick in the 1930s and again in the 1970s with pressboard and aluminum."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"The neurologist made the brain sound more rickety than the old toy trucks Mark used to assemble from discarded cabinet parts and sawn-off detergent bottles."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2006

"The reptile brain, creeping out to sun itself."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)