Date: 1946

"Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie / his rushing brain."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951

"It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower."

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: 1964

"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...

— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

Date: 1972

"as the Whale dives / snapping our mind / like a lifeboat ?"

— Plumb, David

Date: 1992

" He was dangerously obsessed, dangerously obsessed. And his thoughts, like a bobsleigh walled with ice, would not change their course until he had crashed or achieved his end."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1995, 2002

"However, as I said last night, we just ask for this because most of us consider ourselves as chauffeurs inside our bodies, which we own in the same way as we own a car. When it goes wrong we take it to the mechanic to fix it and we do not really identify with our body, just as we do not really i...

— Watts, Alan (1915-1973)

Date: 1996

"Drinking caffeine is thus like putting a block of wood under one of the brain's primary brake pedals."

— Braun, Stephen

Date: 1996

"You would certainly feel stimulated, since one of your brain's main "brakes" would be disabled. But other brakes, such as GABA, would still be functioning and in the absence of any extra direct stimulants overall activity wouldn't kindle into the kind of neural conflagration that can occur with ...

— Braun, Stephen

Date: 1997

"Forgive me, Friend, I've again presum'd our Minds running before the same Wind."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1999

"The insomniac's brain is a choo-choo train."

— Simic, Charles (b. 1938)