Date: 1963

"Words dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1980

"And here we find our greatest affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement."

— Robinson, Marilynne (b. 1943)

Date: 1984

"Small and far away on the mind's screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood,"

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1992

"After a while, he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a d...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Only this violence could break open a world constrained by the hidden cameras of conscience and vanity."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1997

"She occupies now an entirely new angular relation to Mercy, to those refusals, among the Living, to act on behalf of Death or its ev'ryday Coercions,--Wages too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death's thousand Metaphors in the World,--as if, the instant of h...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)