Date: 1927

"This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the 'impression' has been printed in us by reality itself."

— Proust, Marcel (1871-1922)

Date: 1963

"And she set something on my tongue and in panic I bit down, and darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1984

"Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print literate."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1992

"Even more important to David than the very natural worry that his wife and his son might grow fond of one another was the intoxicating feeling that he had a blank consciousness to work with, and it gave him great pleasure to knead this yielding clay with his artistic thumbs."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1998

"The thought scrolled round and round in his mind--it went well, it went well."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1999

"I tried to keep my mind white and blank."

— Budnitz, Judy (b. 1973)

Date: 2000

"He must get the whole thing clear, like a diagram hanging in the translucent space of his imagination, the blueprint of a missile that would lay waste to the Great Consciousness Debate."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2006

"Conciousness works by telling a story, one that is whole, continuous, and stable. When that story breaks, consciousness rewrites it. Each revised draft claims to be the original."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2010

"His cell was a concrete box six feet by ten with one window and a steel door with a slot wide enough to slip his hands through but that was all, and most of the time he just lay there on his cot, his mind so blank it was like a pail with nothing in it."

— Cronin, Justin

Date: 2010

"The sentences were as clear in his mind as if written there."

— Cronin, Justin