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

"One day quite soon, probably within the year, he will walk out of a room and never see her again, and this thought is so hard to conceive of that he shoves it away violently, concentrating instead on himself: his hangover, how tired he feels, how the pain throbs in his temples as he trots down t...

— 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

"Eliot closes his eyes and sorts through the database of biblical references that he jammed into his brain during his days as a somewhat-more-devout young man."

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2009

"Like some inoperable cancerous thing inside his brain, a new mental organ had awakened, insistently and without mercy pushing him forward, punishing him with guilt, compelling him to feel things and want things that can't be argued for or against on the basis of logical reasoning, analy...

— Konstantinou, Lee

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

"Whatever else has happened to him, the moral thing that erupted in his mind hasn't gone into remission. If anything, it has only metastasized, secretly colonizing, under the cover of this last month's madness, more and more of his sense of self."

— 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

"And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)