Date: April 24, 2011

"God seeks a destiny in all things fired / in the kiln of the sun or the mind."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: May 23, 2011

"Learning isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think."

— Deresiewicz, William (b. 1964)

Date: May 21, 2011

"My thoughts turn into the cowbirds wandering among the horses’ hooves."

— Klinkenbourg, Verlyn (b. 1952)

Date: June 4, 2011

"My desk faces a wall covered with images, notes, timelines, vaudeville photographs and playbills; my keyboard sits in a small black space surrounded by piles of books and paper -- the brain disgorged and arrayed."

— Endicott, Marina (b. 1958)

Date: June 14, 2011

"Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: June 14, 2011

"According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: June 14, 2011

"But they usually assume that the purpose of reasoning is to help an individual arrive at the truth, and that irrationality is a kink in that process, a sort of mental myopia."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: June 14, 2011

"They are a result of the way that the brain, a Rube Goldberg mental contraption, processes memory."

— Cohen, Patricia

Date: June, 2011

"No part of you is broken. / No bruises and no disease / and no neurological torpor / filling you up like a cold season."

— Guest, Paul

Date: March/April 2011

"He poured himself a brandy and lit a cigar, and tried to concentrate on other things--his many victories, the bravery of his men--but his thoughts swirled in tiny eddies, settling first here, then there, moving as the wind does from empty town to empty town."

— Strand, Mark (b. 1934)