Date: 1992

"Indigestion tablets, thought Victor, belching softly, to help break down the doughy bulk of sensation?"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1994

"Pigsty for a brain, / Stop them [the body and soul] from making faces at each other / In the mirror!"

— Simic, Charles (b. 1938)

Date: 1995

"Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"Mornings when I meditated / I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul, / not the complex mysteries of love and hate."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

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: 1997

"He does not want to know. So much does he not want to know that he can feel a hand go up inside his own head to block his ears, block his sight."

— Coetzee, J. M. (b. 1940)

Date: 1997

"Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"They were possessing her in ways more intimate than had ever been allow'd him...interfering at orders of minitude invisible to the human Eye, infiltrated without need of light or Map, commanding the further branches of whatever flows in a Soul like blood,...she and her Captors whispering togethe...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1998

"Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and...

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)