Date: 2009

"This kind of erotic reverie occupied great swathes of Dexter's mental energy, and he wondered if perhaps Emma was right, perhaps he was a little too distracted by the sexual side of things."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"Blackbirds are singing on Coldharbour Lane and he has the sensation, so vivid that it is almost an hallucination, that he is entirely hollow; empty, like an easter egg."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be nob...

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"All these years later he still carried with him, would carry for life, the image of her standing in mismatched underwear in the staffroom of Loco Caliente, illuminated by a shaft of afternoon sun like the light in a cathedral, as she yelled at him to get out and shut the bloody door."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"His daddy issues need to be resolved, his therapist says, and he could probably stand to improve his relationship with his mother too, but Eliot wonders whether any amount of analysis will ever unknot this tangled mass of mental rope."

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2009

"This librarian told me that your mind works like a computer, or maybe an old card file."

— Chideya, Farai (b. 1969)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"'Unraveling' was our family euphemism for senility."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2010

"Grey could still feel Zero's mind roving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"Yet somehow, while he'd slept, the name had taken up residence in his head, as if he'd gone to sleep listening to a song played over and over, the lyrics digging a rut into his brain like a plow, and now part of his mind was still in that rut and couldn't get out."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2011

"His mind unwinding like a spool of loose thread."

— Nadzam, Bonnie