Date: 2011

"He felt ash filling up his chest and throat from the inside, blocking his mouth and thickening his heart and filling up his head, he hoped, blocking it out like the heavy gray ceiling of winter settling in over the plains, so that he would not be able to see into it."

— Nadzam, Bonnie

Date: July 12, 2013

"The disheartening fact is that for every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few—the British scholar Frank Kermode kindled Shakespeare into an eternal flame in my head—there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two ...

— Siegel, Lee (b. 1957)

Date: July 5, 2014

"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."

— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)

Date: September 1, 2014

"Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up."

— Chorost, Michael (b. 1964)

Date: January 21, 2015

"Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside."

— Burkeman, Oliver (b. 1975)

Date: August, 21, 2015

"But this summer, 'The New Yorker' published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared."

— Egan, Timothy (b. 1954)

Date: 2015

"And yes, mortal knells / in sleepless hours, hollow knocks of empty / boats against a dock but still the mind / is a meadow, the heart an ocean even though / it burns."

— Young, Dean (b. 1955)

Date: December 12, 2016

"tell me, Bird, how soul inhabits the place of fire, / how soul dwells there in its trembling?"

— De la O, Marsha

Date: January 12, 2018

"He also shared some thoughts about James Comey--if, by thoughts, you mean the products of the dying sparks of sputtering synapses."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)