Date: 1992

"Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. . There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping a...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Or--he must stop thinking about it--or [his consciousness seemed] like a solution of saturated copper sulphate under the microscope, when it suddenly transforms and crystals break out everywhere on its surface."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1998

"Anxieties about work transmuted into the baser metal of simple night fear: illness and death, abstractions that soon found their focus in the sensation he still felt in his left hand."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1999

"The next day, I changed all my classmates’ names to numbers to better reflect their metal hearts."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 2000

"At first he tried to contain this chaos: surely there were choices behind these analogies, desires behind the choices, psychological structures behind the desires, and, underlying the psychology, the stainless steel of generative grammar."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I glimpsed a molten core to consciousness, a protean heat where everything could be reshaped. Yes, a molten core, like the core of the earth, deeper than the deposits of civilisation, beyond the complacencies of archaeology."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2006

"It was a time in Cripple and Victor, Leadville and Creede, when men were finding their way to the unblastable seams of their own secret natures, learning the true names of desire, which spoke, so they dreamed, would open the way through the mountains to all that had been denied them."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2009

"She turned to face the tree-line, but over the years she had reached a level of familiarity with Dexter where it had become possible to hear an idea enter his mind, like a stone thrown into mud."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)