Date: 2000

"The scattered jigsaw puzzle of my attention reassembled into a single image."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"Outside, no limits; inside, no room. Then no limits inside, then none inside me. Agoraphobia on the bone, agoraphobia in the marrow."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I was driven by local emotions into a freewheeling lateral association, or downwards in a potentially endless search for the anchor at the end of some chain of thought, or upwards into more and more denuded categories of categories."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"And then, because this search can only find arbitrary resting-places, it was the whole process, accepted with complete permissiveness, which became fundamental; its endlessness was its resting-place: thoughts seemed to radiate from and collapse into the same source, as if the whole history of a ...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2001

"And now, whenever I see a photograph of Wittgenstein somewhere or other, I feel more and more as if Austerlitz were gazing at me out of it, and when I look at Austerlitz it is as if I see in him the disconsolate philosopher, a man locked into the glaring clarity of his logical thinking as inextr...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"Both ideas were right in a way at the time, since the new station was literally rising from the ruins of the old Liverpool Street; in any case, the crucial point was hardly this speculation in itself, which was really only a distraction, but the scraps of memory beginning to drift through the ou...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"And the sweet fragrance wafting up from the walled garden, the waxing moon already in the sky above the rooftops, the sound of church bells ringing down in the city, and the yellow façade of the tailor's house with its green balcony where Moravec, who as Vera told me had died long ago, frequentl...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"On the evening of that day, when I visited Vera for the second time in her flat in the Šporkova and she confirmed, in answer to my question, that Agáta had indeed worn sequined sky-blue shoes with her costume as Olympia, I felt as if something were shattering inside my brain."

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

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

"... moving from the minor mode it had been in throughout into the major, ending with a Picardy third cadence that, if it did not break Lew's heart exactly, did leave a fine crack that in time was to prove unmendable."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)