Date: February 1, 2016

"Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads."

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 1, 2016

"I read for hours that way, morning after morning, my mind awhirl."

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 9, 2016

"There is something deeply disturbing in his [Ted Cruz's] disassociation, a lack of empathy which suggests a barren inner landscape."

— Patterson, Richard North (b. 1947)

Date: April 18, 2016

"We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we're wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind's background and images encountered on the screen had become one's first frame of cultural reference."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"Lucinda, when I finally forced her to start watching, correctly told me to stop bitching about the dragons: they were part of the deal, the price of voluntarily lowering oneself into the pit of the brain."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: May 28, 2016

"It occurred to me that of all mind-boiling aspects of the current presidential race, the worst part was arguing with people whom I considered friends."

— Flores, Jake

Date: May 28, 2016

"The human brain is a pattern-matching machine."

— Vanderbilt, Tom (b. 1968)

Date: 2016

"You were one of them, / weren't you, with death / itching in the brain like a cloud of midges?"

— Guest, Paul