page 1479 of 1527     per page:
sorted by:

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

preview | full record

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)

preview | full record

Date: Winter 2011

"I'm doing a reading that night and so is Jean but in different places and I don't know how to reach her or Andrew or the vague choir of boys swimming in my mind or why I even need to reach the vague choir (except for another fix of beauty)."

— Klein, Michael

preview | full record

Date: July 30, 2011

"I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was 10, but I think that having all those books and sentences composting in my brain may have pushed me toward becoming a writer in the long run."

— Meloy, Maile (born January 1, 1972)

preview | full record

Date: September 5, 2011

"He [Derek Parfit] pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up...

— MacFarquhar, Larissa

preview | full record

Date: September 2, 2011

"When we fight an urge, it feels like a strenuous effort, as if there were a homunculus in the head that physically impinged on a persistent antagonist."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

preview | full record

Date: September 2, 2011

"We speak of exerting will power, of forcing ourselves to go to work, of restraining ourselves and of controlling our temper, as if it were an unruly dog."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

preview | full record

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)

preview | full record

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)

preview | full record

Date: 2011

"Marx, his mind as hard and brilliant as a diamond, knew he would emerge the victor in any battle of wits."

— Gabriel, Mary

preview | full record

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.