Date: November 21, 2012

"I've come to believe that a good cry is like a carwash for the soul."

— Hayes, Bill

Date: 2012

"Fleeing from the dank halls of the mind's prison toward the grassy meadows of the material world, speculative realism must also make good on the first term of its epithet: metaphysics need not seek verification, whether from experience, physics, mathematics, formal logic, or even reason."

— Bogost, Ian

Date: December 17, 2012

"Until very recently, the human mind was a black box. But here we are in the 21st century, and now we have all these new technologies with opportunities to look inside that black box--a little."

— Liao, S. Matthew

Date: December 2, 2012

"For now, our ability to understand how all those parts [of the brain] relate is quite limited, sort of like trying to understand the political dynamics of Ohio from an airplane window above Cleveland."

— Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

Date: March 19, 2012

"I mean seriously, HOLY FUCK. My mind exploded when I looked at this."

— Margary, Drew

Date: March 19, 2012

"Even when I got the question right, the mental strain it took to try and dig through the piles of shit-encrusted mildew in my brain to retrieve the information needed to solve any given equation was brutal."

— Margary, Drew

Date: February 16, 2012

"Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next."

— Klein, Ezra (b. May 9, 1984)

Date: October 28, 2012

"Each grasped, in the unflinching gaze of the other, a silent acknowledgment of the nobility of man, especially as manifested in work, the work that purified the soul the way steel is purified in the smelter. That sort of thing."

— Saunders, George (b. 1958)

Date: September 27, 2012

"The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation."

— Lilla, Mark (b. 1956)

Date: August 21, 2012

"Though her book is entitled 'In Praise of Messy Lives' (The Dial Press, 288 pp., $25), Ms. Roiphe’s mind is neat as a pin, untroubled by the unexpected inference, the awareness of mitigating factors in television or film or literature that might unmake her arguments."

— D'Addario, Daniel