Date: 1971, 1979

"Thinking is trying to better one's instructions; it is trying out promissory tracks which will exist, if they ever do exist, only after one has stumbled exploringly over ground where they are not."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1996

"One would expect, then, that such a political period would be rife with various veins of pseudo-mysticism, enamoured of whatever gives the slip to the concept, enthralled by those spasms of mind which confound its customary distinctions, which breed in us some ecstatic state of indeterminacy in ...

— Eagleton, Terry (b. 1943)

Date: 1998

"His nakedness against the sheet, the wanton tangle of bedclothes by his ankle, and the sight of his own genitalia, at his age not yet fully obscured by the swell and spread of his gut, sent vague sexual thoughts floating across his mind like remote summer clouds."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)