Date: 1972

"Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind."

— Seals, Jim (b. 1941) and Dash Crofts (b. 1940)

Date: 1989

"Like trees similar in their gross physical profile, brains can be similar in their gross functional profiles while being highly idiosyncratic in the myriad details of their fine-grained arborization."

— Churchland, Paul (b. 1942)

Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1992

"Other people's words drifted through his mind, like the tumbleweed across a windy desert in the opening shots of 'They Came from Outer Space.'"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"That terror was the price he had to pay for the first heartbreaking wave of pleasure when consciousness seemed to burst out, like white blossoms, along the branches of every nerve."

— 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

"Other people's words drifted through his mind. Tumbleweed riding through a desert. Had he already thought that?"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1999

"The cactus where your heart should be / Has lovely little flowers / So though it's always pricking me / My ardor never sours."

— Stephin Merritt (b. February 9, 1965)

Date: 2000

"As he allowed the old order to be dismembered, a new erotic order arose in which there was an unceasing intercourse between sensation and conception, the mental blossoming of every sensation and the embodiment of every idea."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider's web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)