Date: September 2, 2011

"The 'will' in willpower is not some mysterious 'free will,' a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: October 7, 2011

"In the wayward note, the bumps and curves of the author's mind seem to be laid plain on the paper."

— Horowitz, Alexandra

Date: March 11, 2011

"The huge submerged bulk of the mental iceberg, with its stores of memory and acquired skills that have become automatic, like language, driving and etiquette, supplies people with the raw materials on which they can exercise their reason and decide what to think and what to do."

— Nagel, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: February 3, 2012

"Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don't respond to it."

— Samet, Elizabeth D.

Date: March 9, 2012

"If we acquire a bad habit this way it is very hard to change, because its grooves are so well worn in our minds."

— Wilson, Timothy D.

Date: December 11, 2014

"Marginalia is a blow struck against the idea that reading is a one-way process, that readers simply open their minds and the great, unmediated thoughts of the author pour in."

— Miller, Laura

Date: March 19, 2015

"When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the whirr and hum of thought: it feels woven of reciprocity, willing, ambition, the impulse to translate fugitive thoughts into communication with others."

— Warner, Marina (b. 1946)

Date: June 2, 2015

"Padding for the mental life, so to speak."

— Parker, James

Date: September 22, 2015

"This is not to say that "Tender Torrent" wasn't "fun" (it seems to be out of print today, the most enduring form of censorship); but for me, its greatest entertainment value lay in returning it to its owner, aware of the lewd visions that seethed beneath her sunny exterior. And really, that perc...

— Schillinger, Liesl