Date: 2000

"As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider's web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"My mind floated like the Bullet Train above its tracks, meeting no obstruction; everything clear."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2005

"It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"They fluttered [my memories] back eventually--but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"Sometimes I'd be hooked out, plucked and hauled right up into the daylight where I'd find Trevellian shining his torch into me, its shaft falling across my mind's patterned surfaces but managing to occupy them only briefly before it retreated and the inner darkness massed again."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"Odd things were unearthed, bits of memory that must have been floating around like the fragment of bone inside my knee."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"I looked away from them and saw in my mind's eye a plane bursting open and transforming itself into cloud."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"The van emerged into the scene; men emerged from it and the whole event emerged, like a photo emerging. I didn't even need to see it. I closed my eyes and let it all develop in my mind."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2009

"He steered his thoughts away from the subject of sex, his brain as nimble as an aircraft carrier."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"He turned and lay down on his front alongside her, head resting on his arms, their elbows touching, and once again she could hear the sound of his thoughts."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)