Date: 2001

"It is as substantial or insubstantial as the shadow of a house, in which some things will grow, some not."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

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: 2006

"In power mindfulness, the mind is like a megawatt searchlight, enabling you to see so much deeper into what you are gazing at."

— Ajahn Brahm [born Peter Betts] (August 7, 1951)

Date: 2006

"She was there, in Weber's strobing mind, when he stepped into the jetway at La-Guardia, and gone when he found himself, that same afternoon, dead center in the evacuated prairie, with no transition but a jump cut."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2007

"When a human embryo is seven weeks old, / the brain shines through its forehead, a cloud / of light, belly-deep and breathing, / the whole, luminous mass cabled and alone."

— Witt, Sam (b. 1970)

Date: 2008

"In a sense, the mind works like a flashlight: When you point a flashlight at an object in a dark room, that object emerges from the darkness, as if coming into existence."

— Somov, Pavel G.

Date: March 31, 2009

"As smart as we are, in this sense we are all dim bulbs."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"Everything I saw, faces, bodies ambling through the cabin, stowing their baggage here, sitting down, stowing their baggage there, sitting down, was followed by a reflective shadow that could not desist from telling me that I was seeing this now while aware that I was seeing this, and so on ad ab...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: February 1, 2010

"Burn the body down / And, with it, out goes the pilot / Blue light of the mind."

— Cruz, Cynthia

Date: May 27, 2010

"When you direct your mental spotlight to the basketball passes, it leaves the rest of the world in darkness."

— Bloom, Paul (b. 1963)