Date: 2010

"The Professor was my very own bespoke monstre sacrée for so long--so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth--that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial shtick: a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol asp...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: February 15, 2011

"If you want to use a memory palace for permanent storage, you have to take periodic time-consuming mental strolls through it to keep your images from fading."

— Foer, Joshua

Date: 2011

"I could share an hour of warm camaraderie with Dad, then once I'd walked out the door, get the uncanny feeling I'd disappeared into the wings of his mind's stage, like a character no longer necessary to the ongoing story line."

— Reagan, Ron (b. 1958)

Date: March 11, 2011

"Given the limits of steel and concrete to resist the forces of nature, much depends on people’s own preparedness to face up to disaster -- but that mental infrastructure is in even poorer shape than the nation’s roads and bridges."

— Schwartz, John

Date: September 5, 2011

"He [Derek Parfit] pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up...

— MacFarquhar, Larissa

Date: April 25, 2011

"The most recent neuroscience papers make the brain sound like a Victorian attic, full of odd, vaguely labelled objects ticking away in every corner."

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: April 25, 2011

"At U.C.L.A., Dean Buonomano believes that areas throughout the brain function as clocks, their tissue ticking with neural networks that change in predictable patterns. 'Imagine a skyscraper at night,' he told me. 'Some people on the top floor work till midnight, while some on the lower floors ma...

— Bilger, Burkhard

Date: 2011

"Clean out my heart, you know? It's like a crowded old garage. It needs emptying and sorting."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: August 2012

"My mother treated these eruptions like outbreaks of bad weather, waiting them out under some mysterious mental shelter."

— Roth, Marco (b. 1974)