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, 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)

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

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)

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)

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: June 27, 2025

"Quite often the thing that people respond to in my books is the train – the train wreck – of thought."

— Dyer, Geoff (b. 1958)